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Quantifying information and performance for flash detection in the blowfly photoreceptor

  • University of Maryland, College Park

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Performance on specific tasks in an organism's everyday activities is essential to survival. In this paper, we extend information-theoretic investigation of neural systems to task specific information using a detailed biophysical model of the blowfly photoreceptor. We determine the optimal detection performance using ideal observer analysis and find that detection threshold increases with background light according to a power function. We show how Fisher information is related to the detection performance and compare Fisher information and mutual information in this task-specific context. Our detailed model of the blowfly photoreceptor enables us to detangle the components of phototransduction and analyze the sensitivity of detection performance with respect to biophysical parameters. The biophysical model of the blowfly photoreceptor provides a rich framework for investigation of neural systems.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)479-487
Number of pages9
JournalNeural Networks
Volume18
Issue number5-6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2005

Keywords

  • Biophysical model
  • Blowfly photoreceptor
  • Fisher information
  • Flash detection
  • Ideal observer analysis
  • Sensitivity analysis

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