Encoding efficiency of suprathreshold stochastic resonance on stimulus-specific information

• Evaluating the noise-enhanced encoding efficiency via stimulus-specific information.
• New form of stochastic resonance based on the measure of encoding efficiency.
• Analyzing neural encoding schemes from suprathreshold stochastic resonance detailedly.

In this paper, we evaluate the encoding efficiency of suprathreshold stochastic resonance (SSR) based on a local information-theoretic measure of stimulus-specific information (SSI), which is the average specific information of responses associated with a particular stimulus. The theoretical and numerical analyses of SSIs reveal that noise can improve neuronal coding efficiency for a large population of neurons, which leads to produce increased information-rich responses. The SSI measure, in contrast to the global measure of average mutual information, can characterize the noise benefits in finer detail for describing the enhancement of neuronal encoding efficiency of a particular stimulus, which may be of general utility in the design and implementation of a SSR coding scheme.