Kafashan, MohammadMehdiJaffe, Anna W.Chettih, Selmaan N.Nogueira, RamonArandía Romero, IñigoHarvey, Christopher D.Moreno Bote, RubénDrugowitsch, Jan2021-03-092021-03-092021Kafashan M, Jaffe AW, Chettih SN, Nogueira R, Arandia-Romero I, Harvey CD, Moreno-Bote R, Drugowitsch J. Scaling of sensory information in large neural populations shows signatures of information-limiting correlations. Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 20;12(1):473. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20722-y2041-1723http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46699How is information distributed across large neuronal populations within a given brain area? Information may be distributed roughly evenly across neuronal populations, so that total information scales linearly with the number of recorded neurons. Alternatively, the neural code might be highly redundant, meaning that total information saturates. Here we investigate how sensory information about the direction of a moving visual stimulus is distributed across hundreds of simultaneously recorded neurons in mouse primary visual cortex. We show that information scales sublinearly due to correlated noise in these populations. We compartmentalized noise correlations into information-limiting and nonlimiting components, then extrapolate to predict how information grows with even larger neural populations. We predict that tens of thousands of neurons encode 95% of the information about visual stimulus direction, much less than the number of neurons in primary visual cortex. These findings suggest that the brain uses a widely distributed, but nonetheless redundant code that supports recovering most sensory information from smaller subpopulations.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20722-yMice, Inbred C57BLNoisePhotic StimulationVisual Cortexinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess