Topic: optimal transport theory

Information in the nervous system is encoded by the spiking patterns of large populations of neurons. The analysis of such high-dimensional data is typically restricted to simple, arbitrarily defined features like spike rates, which discards information in the temporal structure of spike trains. Here, we use a recently developed method called SpikeShip based on optimal transport theory, which captures information from all the relative spike-timing relations among neurons. We compared spike-rate and spike-timing codes in neural ensembles from six visual areas during natural video presentations.