|
|
|
 |
|
Adrienne Fairhall
University of Washington, USA
Wednesday 22 October 2008
16.00
Seminar Room B10 (Basement)
Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR
The biophysics of adaptive coding on multiple timescales
Single neurons can represent information about a complex, rapidly varying, modulated signal at multiple timescales. I will discuss how the stimulus features that single spikes encode from a fast-varying signal depend both on the biophysics of the neuron and on the statistical properties of the stimulus. Additionally, the mean firing rate encodes information about the stimulus envelope. We have recently shown experimentally that the response of cortical pyramidal cells to a modulated random noise input can be described as fractional differentiation of the stimulus envelope. One can show that this property arises from the dynamics of slow adaptive currents.