Neuronal population size and reliable information transmission

Abstract:

The concept of mutual information has become indispensable in the analysis of information flow in various stochastic physical or biological systems. However, the amount of information that can actually be transmitted, and reliably decoded, is related to the mutual information only in the thermodynamic limit of infinitely many codewords, implying delays and untractable decoder complexity. We demonstrate the importance of the finite-size effects that occur in restricted systems, on an example of a layer of independent Hodgkin-Huxley type neurons (though the analysis is applicable to a more general situation as well).