Estimating Information Transmission Time Between Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum by Transfer Entropy

Transmission timing is an important dynamic parameter to characterize two coupled systems between which information are exchanged. We used an information-theoretic approach known as transfer entropy to measure the information transmission delay times between two simulated autoregressive processes with uni-and bi-directional quadric coupling. The estimated results agreed with the delay parameter settings. We also applied this method to estimate the delay time between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and striatum based on local field potentials recorded simultaneously in the two areas of the monkey. The delay time from PFC to striatum was much shorter than that in the pathway from striatum to PFC, consistent with anatomical structure between the two areas. Our results demonstrated the capacity of transfer entropy in measuring information transfer delays.