representation of dynamical stimuli in populations of threshold neurons表示数量的动力刺激阈值神经元.pdfVIP

Representation of Dynamical Stimuli in Populations of Threshold Neurons Tatjana Tchumatchenko1,2,3*, Fred Wolf1,2,3 1 Department of Nonlinear Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, Germany, 2 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany, 3 Collaborative Research Center 889 Cellular Mechanisms of Sensory Processing, Goettingen, Germany Abstract Many sensory or cognitive events are associated with dynamic current modulations in cortical neurons. This raises an urgent demand for tractable model approaches addressing the merits and limits of potential encoding strategies. Yet, current theoretical approaches addressing the response to mean- and variance-encoded stimuli rarely provide complete response functions for both modes of encoding in the presence of correlated noise. Here, we investigate the neuronal population response to dynamical modifications of the mean or variance of the synaptic bombardment using an alternative threshold model framework. In the variance and mean channel, we provide explicit expressions for the linear and non-linear frequency response functions in the presence of correlated noise and use them to derive population rate response to step-like stimuli. For mean-encoded signals, we find that the complete response function depends only on the temporal width of the input correlation function, but not on other functional specifics. Furthermore, we show that both mean- and variance-encoded signals can relay high-frequency inputs, and in both schemes step-like changes can be detected instantaneously. Finally, we obtain the pairwise spike correlation function and the spike triggered average from the linear mean-evoked response function. These results provide a maximally tractable limiting case that complements and extends previous results obtained in the i