Linking structure and activity in nonlinear spiking networks
Fig 20
Potential impacts of correlations on coding in a presence of a nonlinearity.
A) The independent Poisson assumption for neurons gives rise to uncorrelated distributions of population activity. B) Correlations could increase or decrease the overlap of those distributions by stretching them, decreasing or increasing the decoding performance (top and bottom, respectively). C) The impact of correlations on the mean responses can shift those distributions, potentially counteracting the impact of stretching the distributions (as shown), or exaggerating it.