The signal in a heterogeneous population.

<p>The signal, in terms of the covariance between the neural response and the stimulus is shown as a function of the cell number in a heterogeneous population based on the responses of all cells in the data set. The inset shows the distribution of the signal over the different eigenvectors of the neural spike-count correlation matrix (with uniform correlation coefficient of 0.2), as a function of the rank of their eigenvalue, in percent. Note that the first eigenvector corresponds to the uniform vector (cf <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0081660#pone-0081660-g013" target="_blank">Figure 13</a>). The signal and the correlation matrix were estimated using 10,000 repetitions for every stimulus value .