Simone Blanco Malerba

Abstract Cortical neurons projecting to the same target area may form specialized population codes to transmit information, but whether and how they do so remains unclear. We used calcium imaging in mouse posterior parietal cortex, retrograde labeling and statistical multivariate models to address this question during a delayed match-to-sample task in virtual reality. We found that neurons projecting to the same area have elevated pairwise activity correlations.

eLife Assessment This study offers a valuable treatment of how the population of excitatory and inhibitory neurons integrates principles of energy efficiency in their coding strategies. The convincing analysis provides a comprehensive characterisation of the model, highlighting the structured connectivity between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The role of the many free parameters are discussed and studied in depth.

Abstract The principle of efficient coding posits that sensory cortical networks are designed to encode maximal sensory information with minimal metabolic cost. Despite the major influence of efficient coding in neuroscience, it has remained unclear whether fundamental empirical properties of neural network activity can be explained solely based on this normative principle.