To which extend is the "neural code'' a metric ?

Bruno Cessac (1, 2) , Horacio Rostro (1) , Juan Carlos Vasquez (1) , Thierry Viéville (3)

1 INLN - Institut Non Linéaire de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
2 ODYSSEE - Computer and biological vision
3 CORTEX - Neuromimetic intelligence

Here is proposed a review of the different choices to structure spike trains, using deterministic metrics. Temporal constraints observed in biological or computational spike trains are first taken into account The relation with existing neural codes (rate coding, rank coding, phase coding, ..) is then discussed. To which extend the ``neural code'' contained in spike trains is related to a metric appears to be a key point, a generalization of the Victor-Purpura metric family being proposed for temporal constrained causal spike trains.

Mots clés: Spiking neurons; Neural coding; Representations of time and sequence

Domaines: Neurosciences [q-bio.NC]; Neurosciences

Bruno Cessac, Horacio Rostro, Juan Carlos Vasquez, Thierry Viéville. To which extend is the "neural code'' a metric ?. Deuxième conférence française de Neurosciences Computationnelles, "Neurocomp08", Oct 2008, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-00331567⟩