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Extraction of network topology from multi-electrode recordings : is there a small-world effect?
(2011)
The simultaneous recording of the activity of many neurons poses challenges for multivariate data analysis. Here, we propose a general scheme of reconstruction of the functional network from spike train recordings. Effective, causal interactions are estimated by fitting generalized linear models on the neural responses, incorporating effects of the neurons’ self-history, of input from other neurons in the recorded network and of modulation by an external stimulus. The coupling terms arising from synaptic input can be transformed by thresholding into a binary connectivity matrix which is directed. Each link between two neurons represents a causal influence from one neuron to the other, given the observation of all other neurons from the population. The resulting graph is analyzed with respect to small-world and scale-free properties using quantitative measures for directed networks. Such graph-theoretic analyses have been performed on many complex dynamic networks, including the connectivity structure between different brain areas. Only few studies have attempted to look at the structure of cortical neural networks on the level of individual neurons. Here, using multi-electrode recordings from the visual system of the awake monkey, we find that cortical networks lack scale-free behavior, but show a small, but significant small-world structure. Assuming a simple distance-dependent probabilistic wiring between neurons, we find that this connectivity structure can account for all of the networks’ observed small-world-ness. Moreover, for multi-electrode recordings the sampling of neurons is not uniform across the population. We show that the small-world-ness obtained by such a localized sub-sampling overestimates the strength of the true small-world structure of the network. This bias is likely to be present in all previous experiments based on multi-electrode recordings.
As important as the intrinsic properties of an individual nervous cell stands the network of neurons in which it is embedded and by virtue of which it acquires great part of its responsiveness and functionality. In this study we have explored how the topological properties and conduction delays of several classes of neural networks affect the capacity of their constituent cells to establish well-defined temporal relations among firing of their action potentials. This ability of a population of neurons to produce and maintain a millisecond-precise coordinated firing (either evoked by external stimuli or internally generated) is central to neural codes exploiting precise spike timing for the representation and communication of information. Our results, based on extensive simulations of conductance-based type of neurons in an oscillatory regime, indicate that only certain topologies of networks allow for a coordinated firing at a local and long-range scale simultaneously. Besides network architecture, axonal conduction delays are also observed to be another important factor in the generation of coherent spiking. We report that such communication latencies not only set the phase difference between the oscillatory activity of remote neural populations but determine whether the interconnected cells can set in any coherent firing at all. In this context, we have also investigated how the balance between the network synchronizing effects and the dispersive drift caused by inhomogeneities in natural firing frequencies across neurons is resolved. Finally, we show that the observed roles of conduction delays and frequency dispersion are not particular to canonical networks but experimentally measured anatomical networks such as the macaque cortical network can display the same type of behavior.
Cortical neurons are typically driven by several thousand synapses. The precise spatiotemporal pattern formed by these inputs can modulate the response of a post-synaptic cell. In this work, we explore how the temporal structure of pre-synaptic inhibitory and excitatory inputs impact the post-synaptic firing of a conductance-based integrate and fire neuron. Both the excitatory and inhibitory input was modeled by renewal gamma processes with varying shape factors for modeling regular and temporally random Poisson activity. We demonstrate that the temporal structure of mutually independent inputs affects the post-synaptic firing, while the strength of the effect depends on the firing rates of both the excitatory and inhibitory inputs. In a second step, we explore the effect of temporal structure of mutually independent inputs on a simple version of Hebbian learning, i.e., hard bound spike-timing-dependent plasticity. We explore both the equilibrium weight distribution and the speed of the transient weight dynamics for different mutually independent gamma processes. We find that both the equilibrium distribution of the synaptic weights and the speed of synaptic changes are modulated by the temporal structure of the input. Finally, we highlight that the sensitivity of both the post-synaptic firing as well as the spike-timing-dependent plasticity on the auto-structure of the input of a neuron could be used to modulate the learning rate of synaptic modification.
Synchronous neuronal firing has been proposed as a potential neuronal code. To determine whether synchronous firing is really involved in different forms of information processing, one needs to directly compare the amount of synchronous firing due to various factors, such as different experimental or behavioral conditions. In order to address this issue, we present an extended version of the previously published method, NeuroXidence. The improved method incorporates bi- and multivariate testing to determine whether different factors result in synchronous firing occurring above the chance level. We demonstrate through the use of simulated data sets that bi- and multivariate NeuroXidence reliably and robustly detects joint-spike-events across different factors.