2005/02/23 by Julien Mayor, Wulfram Gerstner, Mayor, Julien +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #FOS: Biological sciences #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #q-bio.NC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.q-bio/0502030
27 pages, 7 figures, to appear in J. Physiology (Paris) Vol. 98
arxiv created 2005/02/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We investigate the performance of sparsely-connected networks of integrate-and-fire neurons for ultra-short term information processing. We exploit the fact that the population activity of networks with balanced excitation and inhibition can switch from an oscillatory firing regime to a state of asynchronous irregular firing or quiescence depending on the rate of external background spikes. We find that in terms of information buffering the network performs best for a moderate, non-zero, amount of noise. Analogous to the phenomenon of stochastic resonance the performance decreases for higher and lower noise levels. The optimal amount of noise corresponds to the transition zone between a quiescent state and a regime of stochastic dynamics. This provides a potential explanation on the role of non-oscillatory population activity in a simplified model of cortical micro-circuits.