Xu Z, Wu W, Winter SS, Mehlman ML, Butler WN, Simmons CM, Harvey RE, Berkowitz LE, Chen Y, Taube JS, Wilber AA and Clark BJ (2019) A Comparison of Neural Decoding Methods and Population Coding Across Thalamo-Cortical Head Direction Cells. Front. Neural Circuits 13:75. doi: 10.3389/fncir.2019.00075

Abstract

“Head direction (HD) cells, which fire action potentials whenever an animal points its head in a particular direction, are thought to subserve the animal’s sense of spatial orientation. HD cells are found prominently in several thalamo-cortical regions including anterior thalamic nuclei, postsubiculum, medial entorhinal cortex, parasubiculum, and the parietal cortex. While a number of methods in neural decoding have been developed to assess the dynamics of spatial signals within thalamo-cortical regions, studies conducting a quantitative comparison of machine learning and statistical model-based decoding methods on HD cell activity are currently lacking. Here, we compare statistical model-based and machine learning approaches by assessing decoding accuracy and evaluate variables that contribute to population coding across thalamo-cortical HD cells.”

Xu Z, Wu W, Winter SS, Mehlman ML, Butler WN, Simmons CM, Harvey RE, Berkowitz LE, Chen Y, Taube JS, Wilber AA and Clark BJ (2019) A Comparison of Neural Decoding Methods and Population Coding Across Thalamo-Cortical Head Direction Cells. Front. Neural Circuits 13:75. doi: 10.3389/fncir.2019.00075