Temporal coding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:49, 20 April 2012

Revision as of 04:00, 20 April 2012

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===Sensory systems===

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The mammalian gustatory system is useful for studying temporal coding because of the fairly distinct stimuli and the easeeasily judgediscernible whetherresponses or notof the coding was successful by observing an organism's responses.<ref>Hallock, Robert M. and Patricia M. Di Lorenzo. (2006). [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2006.07.005 "Temporal coding in the gustatory system"]. <i>Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews</i>, 30(8):1145–1160.</ref> Temporally encoded information may help an organism discriminate between different tastants of the same category (sweet, bitter, sour, salty, umami) that elicit very similar responses in terms of spike count. The temporal component of the pattern elicited by each tastant may be used to determine its identity (e.g, the difference between two bitter tastants, such as quinine and denatonium). In this way, both rate coding and temporal coding may be used in the gustatory system – rate for basic tastant type, temporal for more specific differentiation.<ref>Carleton, Alan, Riccardo Accolla, and Sidney A. Simon. (2010). [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2010.04.002 "Coding in the mammalian gustatory system"]. <i>Trends in Neurosciences</i>, 33(7):326–334.</ref>

Research on mammalian gustatory system has shown that there is an abundance of information present in temporal patterns across populations of neurons, and this information is different than that which is determined by rate coding schemes. Groups of neurons may synchronize in response to a stimulus. In studies regarding the front cortical portion of the brain in primates, precise patterns with short time scales, only a few milliseconds in length, were found across small populations of neurons which correlated with certain information processing behaviors. However, little information could be determined from the patterns; one possible theory is they represented the higher-order processing taking place in the brain.<ref>{{cite web|last=Zador, Stevens|first=Charles, Anthony|title=The enigma of the brain|url=https://docs.google.com/a/stolaf.edu/viewer?a=v&pid=gmail&attid=0.1&thid=1369b5e1cdf273f9&mt=application/pdf&url=https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui%3D2%26ik%3D0a436eb2a7%26view%3Datt%26th%3D1369b5e1cdf273f9%26attid%3D0.1%26disp%3Dsafe%26realattid%3Df_h0ty13ea0%26zw&sig=AHIEtbQB4vngr9nDZaMTLUOcrk5DzePKqA|work=© Current Biology 1995, Vol 5 No 12|accessdate=4/08/12}}</ref>