High-level description Here, we review computational tools and methods that are readily used to study information processing in the brain. We divide the question of information processing to encoding, decoding and transmission of information as the three primary information-related functions of biological brains.
In the encoding part, we present the developpement of an influential theory of encoding of sensory information - efficient coding. In the beginning, efficient coding has been proposed as a concept about how to encode the information about a sensory stimulus with the spiking activity of a single sensory neuron. Later on, efficient coding has been applied to neural networks and recently, it has been shown that efficient coding can be implemented with biologically plausible neural architectures with excitatory and inhibitory neurons and other characteristics of biological neurons that are observed in biological networks. We also review how the information in the neural code can be broken down with respect to the type of interaction across neurons (redundant, synergistic and unique).
Besides encoding, an important function of the neural activity is to reliably transmit the information. We review studies that show how correlations between neurons might influence the encoding and the transmission of information. We suggest that encoding and transmission may pose conflicting requirements to the structure of correlations in a neural network.
