Strengthening Relationships between Neural Ideals and Receptive Fields

TL;DR

This paper refines the understanding of how neural ideals relate to receptive fields, correcting previous implications and establishing new if-and-only-if relations that deepen the theoretical framework of neural coding.

Contribution

It corrects the false converses of the Type 4-6 relations and introduces modified relations that form if-and-only-if links with neural ideals and receptive fields.

Findings

Falsehood of converses for Type 4-6 relations.

Modified relations establish if-and-only-if conditions.

Discovery of a new relationship among neural ideals and receptive fields.

Abstract

Neural codes are collections of binary vectors that represent the firing patterns of neurons. The information given by a neural code $C$ can be represented by its neural ideal $J_C$. In turn, the polynomials in $J_C$ can be used to determine the relationships among the receptive fields of the neurons. In a paper by Curto et al., three such relationships, known as the Type 1-3 relations, were linked to the neural ideal by three if-and-only-if statements. Later, Garcia et al. discovered the Type 4-6 relations. These new relations differed from the first three in that they were related to $J_C$ by one-way implications. In this paper, we first show that the converses of these new implications are false at the level of both the neural ideal $J_C$ and the larger ideal $I(C)$ of a code. We then present modified statements of these relations that, like the first three, can be related by if-and-only-if statements to both $J_C$ and $I(C)$. Using the modified relations, we uncover a new relationship involving $J_C$, $I(C)$, and the Type 1-6 relations.