The notion that neurons with higher selectivity carry more information about external sensory inputs is widely accepted in neuroscience. High-selectivity neurons respond to a narrow range of sensory inputs, and thus would be considered highly informative by rejecting a large proportion of possible inputs. In auditory cortex, neuronal responses are less selective immediately after the onset of a sound and then become highly selective in the following sustained response epoch. These 2 temporal response epochs have thus been interpreted to encode first the presence and then the content of a sound input. Contrary to predictions from that prevailing theory, however, we found that the neural population conveys similar information about sound input across the 2 epochs in spite of the neuronal selectivity differences. The amount of information encoded turns out to be almost completely dependent upon the total number of population spikes in the read-out window for this system. Moreover, inhomogeneous Poisson spiking behavior is sufficient to account for this property. These results imply a novel principle of sensory encoding that is potentially shared widely among multiple sensory systems.

在神经科学中，具有较高选择性的神经元携带有关外部感觉输入的更多信息的观点被广泛接受。高选择性神经元对狭窄范围的感觉输入作出反应，因此通过拒绝大部分可能的输入而被认为具有很高的信息意义。在听觉皮层中，声音响起后，神经元反应的选择性降低，然后在随后的持续反应时期变得高度选择性。因此，这两个时间响应时期被解释为首先对声音输入的存在进行编码，然后对声音输入的内容进行编码。然而，与该流行理论的预测相反，我们发现，尽管神经元选择性不同，神经种群仍会在两个时期之间传递有关声音输入的类似信息。事实证明，编码的信息量几乎完全取决于该系统的读取窗口中的总体尖峰总数。而且，不均匀的泊松尖峰行为足以说明该特性。这些结果暗示了一种感觉编码的新颖原理，该原理可能在多个感觉系统之间广泛共享。