Probabilistic Interpretation of Population Codes

We present a theoretical framework for population codes which generalizes naturally to the important case where the population provides information about a whole probability distribution over an underlying quantity rather than just a single value. We use the framework to analyze two existing models, and to suggest and evaluate a third model for encoding such probability distributions. 1 Introduction Population codes, where information is represented in the activities of whole populations ofunits, are ubiquitous in the brain. There has been substantial work on how animals should and/or actually do extract information about the underlying encoded quantity.