ABSTRACT
Neuroscience and psychology.—In cognitive neuroscience and psychology, all input or output to and from the subsystems of a functional architecture is information (→COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS). The neuroscientist’s task is to specify the nature of that information and the mechanisms that transform it within each subsystem. At the neural level, neurophysiologists have long assumed that the information content of a neuron is represented only by its discharge frequency, that is, the number of action potentials it sends to its axon within a given period of time. An alternative view today contends that it is the temporal pattern of discharge that contains the information. In other words, the different patterns generated by variations in the discharge frequency over time may themselves carry information.
