Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Encoding variable cortical states with short-term spike patterns

View ORCID ProfileBartosz Teleńczuk, Richard Kempter, Gabriel Curio, Alain Destexhe
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098210
Bartosz Teleńczuk
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Bartosz Teleńczuk
Richard Kempter
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Gabriel Curio
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Alain Destexhe
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

Abstract

Neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) generate synchronised high-frequency (∼600 Hz) bursts in response to peripheral stimulation, and single-cell activity is locked to the macroscopic 600 Hz EEG wavelets. The mechanism of burst generation and synchronisation in S1 is not yet understood. Using a Poisson model with refractoriness that was fitted to to unit recordings from macaque monkeys, we can explain the synchronisation of neurons as the consequence of coincident synaptic inputs, while their high firing precision stems from the large input amplitude combined with a refractory mechanism. This model reproduced also the distribution of temporal spike patterns over repeated presentation of the same stimulus. In addition, the fine temporal details of the spike patterns are representative of the trial-to-trial variations in population excitability and bear upon the mean population activity. The findings are confirmed in a more detailed computational model of a neuron receiving cortical and thalamic inputs through depressing synapses. Our findings show that a simple feedforward processing of peripheral in-puts could give rise to neuronal responses with non-trivial temporal and population statistics. We conclude that neural systems could use refractoriness to encode variable cortical states into stereotypical short-term spike patterns amenable to processing at neuronal time scales.

Synopsis Neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1, hand area) respond to repeated presentation of the same stimulus with variable sequences of spikes. It is commonly assumed that this variability reflects neuronal “noise”, which is filtered out by temporal or population averaging. Indeed, responses of some cortical neurons are variable when collected over all stimulus repetition, but they form distinct spike patterns when single-trial responses are grouped with respect to the arrangement of spikes and intervening silences. To account for the spike pattern statistics, we developed a simplified model of S1 neurons, which combines the effects of synaptic inputs and intrinsic neural properties. We show that single-neuron and population responses are best reproduced when a private variability in each neuron is combined with a multiplicative gain shared over whole population [Okun et al., 2015, Goris et al., 2014, Schölvinck et al., 2015]. This model is capable of transforming slow modulatory inputs into a set of temporal spike patterns, which might inform about dynamical state of the early stages of sensory processing. This phenomenon exemplifies a general mechanism of transforming the ensemble cortical states into precise temporal spike patterns at the level of single neurons.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted January 04, 2017.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Encoding variable cortical states with short-term spike patterns
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Encoding variable cortical states with short-term spike patterns
Bartosz Teleńczuk, Richard Kempter, Gabriel Curio, Alain Destexhe
bioRxiv 098210; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098210
Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Encoding variable cortical states with short-term spike patterns
Bartosz Teleńczuk, Richard Kempter, Gabriel Curio, Alain Destexhe
bioRxiv 098210; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/098210

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Neuroscience
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (4688)
  • Biochemistry (10379)
  • Bioengineering (7695)
  • Bioinformatics (26372)
  • Biophysics (13547)
  • Cancer Biology (10722)
  • Cell Biology (15460)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (8509)
  • Ecology (12843)
  • Epidemiology (2067)
  • Evolutionary Biology (16886)
  • Genetics (11416)
  • Genomics (15493)
  • Immunology (10638)
  • Microbiology (25254)
  • Molecular Biology (10240)
  • Neuroscience (54593)
  • Paleontology (402)
  • Pathology (1671)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2899)
  • Physiology (4355)
  • Plant Biology (9263)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1588)
  • Synthetic Biology (2561)
  • Systems Biology (6789)
  • Zoology (1470)