From space to time: Spatial inhomogeneities lead to the emergence of spatiotemporal sequences in spiking neuronal networks

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Spatio-temporal sequences of neuronal activity are observed in many brain regions in a variety of tasks and are thought to form the basis of meaningful behavior. However, mechanisms by which a neuronal network can generate spatio-temporal activity sequences have remained obscure. Existing models are biologically untenable because they either require manual embedding of a feedforward network within a random network or supervised learning to train the connectivity of a network to generate sequences. Here, we propose a biologically plausible, generative rule to create spatio-temporal activity sequences in a network of spiking neurons with distance-dependent connectivity. We show that the emergence of spatio-temporal activity sequences requires: (1) individual neurons preferentially project a small fraction of their axons in a specific direction, and (2) the preferential projection direction of neighboring neurons is similar. Thus, an anisotropic but correlated connectivity of neuron groups suffices to generate spatio-temporal activity sequences in an otherwise random neuronal network model.