Neural coding

Neural coding is the relationship between patterns of neural activity and information about stimuli, actions, or internal states. It includes how activity is organized across neurons and over time.

Rate coding: A neural coding scheme in which information is represented by a neuron's firing rate over a time interval. It treats average spike frequency as the signal, rather than emphasizing exact spike timing.
Action potential: A brief, regenerative electrical signal that travels along a neuron's membrane. Its occurrence and timing provide a common unit for describing neural activity.
Sensory coding: The representation of sensory features by activity in sensory nervous systems. It applies coding analysis to information arriving from the external world.
Rate coding versus temporal coding: A comparison between representing information through spike counts and representing it through spike timing. This distinction asks whether timing adds information beyond changes in average firing rate.
Temporal coding: A neural coding scheme in which information depends on when spikes occur relative to stimuli, rhythms, or other spikes. It captures distinctions that average firing rates can miss.
Receptive field: The range of stimulus conditions that influence a neuron's activity. Stimulus tuning is often the first step in identifying what a neuron represents.
Motor control: The processes by which the nervous system plans and produces movement. Motor-related activity can encode intended or ongoing actions.
Labeled-line coding: A scheme in which a neuron's identity or pathway specifies the kind of signal it carries. It contrasts dedicated pathways with codes inferred from patterns across populations.
Population coding: A scheme in which information is represented by the combined activity of a group of neurons. It explains how distributed activity can encode a variable even when individual neurons are broadly tuned.
Tuning curve: A function describing how a neuron's response varies with a stimulus parameter. It summarizes the relation between a stimulus dimension and neural response.

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