On the variability of cortical neural responses: a statistical interpretation

Neural responses in the cerebral cortex exhibit tremendous variability. Understanding the origin and the functional meaning of this variability is of critical importance for our understanding of neural coding. The present study investigates the neural response variability from the view of statistical inference. We will show that high variability can also arise due to the inferential sensitivity in neural coding. This view is supported by the simulation on the representation of nature images.