The mechanisms by which groups of neurons interact is an important facet to understanding how the brain functions. Here we study stochastic neural networks with delayed feedback. The first part of our study looks at how feedback and noise affect the mean firing rate of the network. Secondly we look at how the spatial profile of the feedback affects the behavior of the network.
Our numerical and theoretical results show that negative (inhibitory) feedback linearizes the frequency vs input current (f-I) curve via the divisive gain effect it has on the network. The interaction of the inhibitory feedback and the input bias is what produces the divisive decrease in the slope (known as the gain) of the f-I curve. Our work predicts that an increase in noise is required along with increase in inhibitory feedback to attain a divisive and subtractive shift of the gain as seen in experiments [1].
Our results also show that, although the spatial profile of the feedback does not effect the mean activity of the network, it does influence the overall dynamics of the network. Local feedback generates a network oscillation, which is more robust against disruption by noise or uncorrelated input or network heterogeneity, than that for the global feedback (all-to-all coupling) case. For example uncorrelated input completely disrupts the network oscillation generated by global feedback, but only diminishes the network oscillation due to local feedback. This is characterized by 1st and 2nd order spike train statistics. Further, our theory agrees well with numerical simulations of network dynamics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/27559 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Sutherland, Connie |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 157 p. |
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