TY - JOUR T1 - Coding Efficiency of Fly Motion Processing Is Set by Firing Rate, Not Firing Precision A1 - Spavieri, Deusdedit Lineu, Jr A1 - Eichner, Hubert A1 - Borst, Alexander Y1 - 2010/07/22 N2 - Author Summary How is information about the sensory world represented in the brain? How does this representation change, when the stimulus is contaminated by noise or the brain itself is perturbed by temperature variations? We address these questions by studying motion vision in the fly's visual system. Flies barely thermoregulate but behave normally within a large temperature range. Moreover, visual stimuli are naturally noisy at low intensities and might change considerably within short periods of time. To analyze how the fly's brain handles such perturbations, we recorded responses of a motion-sensitive neuron at different temperatures and light intensities. We analyzed how the responses change and how much information about the stimulus is lost due to noise. We found that response variability and delay are determined mainly by the light intensity, but are barely affected by temperature variations. The information content of the responses was weakly influenced by response noise or delay. The mean firing rate of the neuron, which was strongly influenced by temperature and light level, determined how much stimulus information was contained in response. Based on our results, we can say that over a wide range of environmental conditions, their influence on the efficiency of the system to process information is small. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 6 IS - 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000860 SP - e1000860 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000860 ER -