Abstract
Experimental evidence has revealed the existence of characteristic spiking features in different neural signals, e.g., individual neural signatures identifying the emitter or functional signatures characterizing specific tasks. These neural fingerprints may play a critical role in neural information processing, since they allow receptors to discriminate or contextualize incoming stimuli. This could be a powerful strategy for neural systems that greatly enhances the encoding and processing capacity of these networks. Nevertheless, the study of information processing based on the identification of specific neural fingerprints has attracted little attention. In this work, we study (i) the emerging collective dynamics of a network of neurons that communicate with each other by exchange of neural fingerprints and (ii) the influence of the network topology on the self-organizing properties within the network. Complex collective dynamics emerge in the network in the presence of stimuli. Predefined inputs, i.e., specific neural fingerprints, are detected and encoded into coexisting patterns of activity that propagate throughout the network with different spatial organization. The patterns evoked by a stimulus can survive after the stimulation is over, which provides memory mechanisms to the network. The results presented in this paper suggest that neural information processing based on neural fingerprints can be a plausible, flexible, and powerful strategy.
Highlights
Intraburst neural signatures were first described for the neurons of the pyloric central pattern generator (CPG) of the lobster stomatogastric nervous system (Szücs et al, 2003, 2005)
Experimental evidence demonstrates that some of these precise temporal structures allow the discrimination of neural signals
The bursting activity of some neurons belonging to very different animals displays intraburst neural signatures in the form of cell-specific interspike interval distributions (Szücs et al, 2003, 2005; Garcia et al, 2005; Campos et al, 2007; Zeck and Masland, 2007)
Summary
Intraburst neural signatures were first described for the neurons of the pyloric central pattern generator (CPG) of the lobster stomatogastric nervous system (Szücs et al, 2003, 2005). They consist of very precise spike timings in the bursting activity of some cell-types. Recent experimental findings in this circuit demonstrate that the reproducibility of these neural fingerprints allows us to identify the source of signals with different bursting frequencies and number of spikes per burst, even across different species (Brochini et al, 2011). The observation of different neural fingerprints in widely different vertebrate and invertebrate neural systems suggests that they
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