Reconstruction

Why reconstruct stimuli?

The idea behind reconstructing stimuli from a neural response is to learn something about what kind of information is encoded by the neuron and in what form. Any information you can reconstruct is thereby demonstrated to be available at the level of the neural response from which you made the reconstruction.

One should be clear that there are several other questions which the method does not answer. The fact that you can reconstruct certain information from a spike train does not (by itself) mean that this is the only information the neuron encodes. It also is not (necessarily) a model for how any other cell processes the information. Finally, it says nothing about whether the information is used, much less whether it is useful. There are other methods available and under development to answer some of these questions.

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