Caltech, UC Riverside and UCSD
It has been recognized since the early fifties that sensory neurons are able to encode specific features of experimentally presented stimuli. We developped a method allowing to determine the optimal linear feature encoded in spike trains of sensory neurons in response to stochastic (random) stimuli and to quantify the reliability of this feature encoding. This method was applied to study the response of E- and I- type pyramidal cells of the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of the weakly electric fish, Eigenmannia, to random amplitude modulations of an externaly applied electric field.