BvP Neurons Exhibit a Larger Variety in Statistics of Inter-Spike Intervals than LIF Neurons

Abstract

It was recently found that the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model with the assumption of temporally uncorrelated inputs cannot account for the spiking characteristics of in vivo cortical neurons. Specifically, the inter-spike interval (ISI) distributions of some cortical neurons are known to exhibit relatively large skewness to variation, whereas the LIF model cannot realize such statistics with any combination of model parameters. In the present paper, we show that the Bonhoeffer–van del Pol (BvP) model incorporating the same assumption of uncorrelated inputs can, by contrast, exhibit large skewness values. In this case, the large values of the skewness coefficient are caused by the mixture of widely distributed ISIs and short-and-constant ISIs induced by a sub-threshold oscillation peculiar to Class II neurons, such as the BvP neuron.