Neural Representation of Multi-Dimensional Stimuli

The encoding accuracy of a population of stochastically spiking neurons is studied for different distributions of their tuning widths. The situation of identical radially symmetric receptive fields for all neurons, which is usually considered in the literature, turns out to be disadvantageous from an information-theoretic point of view. Both a variability of tuning widths and a fragmentation of the neural population into specialized subpopulations improve the encoding accuracy.