The temporal coding is a type of neural coding

Neural coding

Neural coding is a neuroscience-related field concerned with how sensory and other information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons. The main goal of studying neural coding is to characterize the relationship between the stimulus and the individual or ensemble neuronal responses and...

 which relies on precise timing of action potential

Action potential

In physiology, an action potential is a short-lasting event in which the electrical membrane potential of a cell rapidly rises and falls, following a consistent trajectory. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, called excitable cells, which include neurons, muscle cells, and...

s or inter-spike intervals.
Combined with traditional rate coding

Rate coding

The rate coding model of neuronal firing communication states that as the intensity of a stimulus increases the frequency or rate of action potentials, or "spike firing", increases. Rate coding is sometimes called frequency coding....

 models, temporal coding can provide additional information with the same rate.
There is no precise definition of temporal code. Actually almost any coding scheme that is not rate coding can be referred to as a temporal code.

Unlike rate coding, the temporal coding model tries to account for short-term stimuli producing a small number of spikes.
For example, if a neuron is capable of firing at a maximum rate of 100 spikes per second, then a stimulus <10ms would likely elicit only a single spike. This model is especially important for sound localization

Sound localization

Sound localization refers to a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. It may also refer to the methods in acoustical engineering to simulate the placement of an auditory cue in a virtual 3D space .The sound localization mechanisms of the...

, which occurs within the brain

Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

 on the order of milliseconds.

The discovery of spike timing dependent plasticity

Spike timing dependent plasticity

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is a biological process that adjusts the strength of connections between neurons in the brain. The process adjusts the connection strengths based on the relative timing of a particular neuron's output and input action potentials...

, where synaptic efficacy is modulated by the precise timing of spikes, provides strong evidence that temporal codes are used for cortical information transmission.

It should not be confused with the coding of the temporal information.

See also

• Sparse coding
  Sparse coding
  The sparse code is a kind of neural code in which each item is encoded by the strong activation of a relatively small set of neurons. For each item to be encoded, this is a different subset of all available neurons....
  
  
• Independent-spike coding
  Independent-spike coding
  The independent-spike coding model of neuronal firing claims that each individual action potential, or "spike", is independent of each other spike within the spike train.Contrast this with correlation coding.-References:...
  
  
• Correlation coding
  Correlation coding
  The correlation coding model of neuronal firing claims that correlations between action potentials, or "spikes", within a spike train may carry additional information above and beyond the simple timing of the spikes...
  
  
• Population coding
  Population coding
  Population coding is a means by which information is coded in a group of neurons. In population coding, each neuron has a distribution of responses over some set of inputs, and the responses of many neurons may be combined to determine some value about the inputs...
  
  
• Neural synchronization