Oscillation structure determines communication accuracy.

<p>(<i>A</i>–<i>D</i>) Example firing rate modulation of the target (red) and distracting inputs (gray) over the 100 ms integration time. Gain modulation (blue) produced by the optimized receiving network. (<i>E</i>) Firing rate as a function of oscillation phase for synchronization strengths from 0.1–0.9. (<i>F</i>) Fisher information as a function of the synchronization strength of the target input for stimulus estimates decoded from receiving network output integrated over 100 ms. Distractor condition indicated by color as shown in key. (<i>G</i>) Comparison of Fisher information for asynchronous and incoherently oscillating distracting inputs as functions of firing rate of input networks. (<i>H</i>) Separation of target and distractors in frequency. Fisher information as function of oscillation frequency of distractor networks for narrowband (purple) and broadband (orange) sinusoidal oscillations and narrowband Von Mises oscillations (blue). Frequency of target input modulation (50 Hz) is indicated by black arrow. (<i>I</i>) Amplitude spectrum of oscillatory modulations for narrowband Von Mises modulation and narrow and broadband sinusoidal oscillations (F₀ is oscillation center frequency).</p

Integration time, modulation frequency and communication accuracy.

<p>(A–D) Fisher information as a function of integration time. Target modulation frequency is indicated by line color (see key). For incoherent distractors (A) and phase separation (D) conditions, distractor frequency was the same as target frequency. For frequency separation condition (C), distractor frequency is indicated by line style (see key). The duration of one period of the target input modulation is indicated by the vertical dashed lines, color coded by target modulation frequency.</p

Bottom-up coherence.

<p>(<i>A</i>) Diagram illustrating receiving network in which gain modulation is a filtered version of the summed combined spike input. (<i>B</i>–<i>E</i>) Comparison of Fisher information of decoded stimulus estimates for original ‘top-down’ model (solid lines) and ‘bottom-up’ model (dashed lines).</p

Filtering with arbitrary gain modulations.

<p>(A–D) Example input firing rate modulations, gain modulations generated by optimized linear filter (blue trace), and gain modulations found to optimize decoding accuracy for specific examples of target firing rate modulation (green traces). (E) Effect of synchronization strength on decoding accuracy for asynchronous distractors (blue), distractors oscillating incoherently in the same frequency band as the target (red) and distractors oscillating coherently with the target but equally space in phase (yellow). (F) Effect of distractor frequency on decoding accuracy. (G) Comparison of decoding accuracy for different distractor conditions indicated by color as above for synchronization strength of 0.5 and average neuronal firing rate of 5 Hz.</p