Emergent population activity in metric-free and metric networks of neurons with stochastic spontaneous spikes and dynamic synapses

[摘要] We show that networks of excitatory neurons with stochastic spontaneous spiking activity and shortterm synaptic plasticity can exhibit spontaneous repetitive synchronization in so-called population spikes. The major reason for this is that synaptic plasticity nonlinearly modulates the interaction between neurons. For large-scale two-dimensional networks, where the connection probability decreases exponentially with increasing distance between the neurons resulting in a small-world network connectome, a population spike occurs in the form of circular traveling waves diverging from seemingly non stationary nucleation sites. The latter is in drastic contrast to the case of networks with a fixed fraction of steady pacemaker neurons, where the set of a few spontaneously formed nucleation sites is stationary. Despite the spatial non-stationarity of their nucleation, population spikes may occur surprisingly regularly. From a theoretical viewpoint, these findings show that the regime of nearly-periodic population spikes, which mimics respiratory rhythm, can occur strictly without stochastic resonance. In addition, the observed spatiotemporal effects serve as an example of transient chimera patterns. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

[发布日期] 2021-10-21

[关键词] Metric neuronal networks;Synaptic plasticity;Stochastic spiking;Spontaneous sync nucleation;Population spike;Transient chimera patterns