Efficient Coding and Information Theory
The development of the Barlow's hypothesis was influenced by information theory introduced by Claude Shannon only a decade before. Information theory provides the mathematical framework for analyzing communication systems. It formally defines concepts such as information, channel capacity, and redundancy. Barlow's model treats the sensory pathway as a communication channel where neuronal spiking is an efficient code for representing sensory signals. The spiking code aims to maximize available channel capacity by minimizing the redundancy between representational units.
A key prediction of the efficient coding hypothesis is that sensory processing in the brain should be adapted to natural stimuli. Neurons in the visual (or auditory) system should be optimized for coding images (or sounds) representative of those found in nature. Researchers have shown that filters optimized for coding natural images lead to filters which resemble the receptive fields of simple-cells in V1. In the auditory domain, optimizing a network for coding natural sounds leads to filters which resemble the impulse response of cochlear filters found in the inner ear.
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