In
neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...
, a population vector is the sum of the preferred directions of a population of
neuron
A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. ...
s,
weighted by the respective spike counts.
The formula for computing the (normalized) population vector,
, takes the following form:
Where
is the activity of cell
, and
is the preferred input for cell
.
Note that the vector
encodes the input direction,
, in terms of the activation of a population of neurons.
Computational neuroscience
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