Optimal localist and distributed coding of spatiotemporal spike patterns through STDP and coincidence detection

Understand

Repeating spatiotemporal spike patterns exist and carry information.

• Here we investigated how a single spiking neuron can optimally respond to one given pattern (localist coding), or to either one of several patterns (distributed coding, i.e.
• the neuron's response is ambiguous but the identity of the pattern could be inferred from the response of multiple neurons), but not to random inputs.
• To do so, we extended a theory developed in a previous paper [Masquelier, 2017], which was limited to localist coding.