Abstract
In this study, we used the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model of neurons to investigate the phase diagram of a developing single-layer neural network and that of a network consisting of two weakly coupled neural layers. These networks are noise driven and learn through the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) or the inverse STDP rules. We described how these networks transited from a non-synchronous background activity state (BAS) to a synchronous firing state (SFS) by varying the network connectivity and the learning efficacy. In particular, we studied the interaction between a SFS layer and a BAS layer, and investigated how synchronous firing dynamics was induced in the BAS layer. We further investigated the effect of the inter-layer interaction on a BAS to SFS repair mechanism by considering three types of neuron positioning (random, grid, and lognormal distributions) and two types of inter-layer connections (random and preferential connections). Among these scenarios, we concluded that the repair mechanism has the largest effect for a network with the lognormal neuron positioning and the preferential inter-layer connections.
Highlights
Many sensory systems of animals, such as insects, frogs, and primates, have shown synchronized and periodic neural activities in the early stages
As the network developed with culturing time, intra-layer connections were established between neurons with the probability piin,jtra
There are some false positives in identifying synchronous neurons by using a low threshold value, they can be avoided by adding a constraint in the root mean square deviation of neurons’ firing time to ensure that neurons’ firing events are within a limited time span
Summary
Many sensory systems of animals, such as insects, frogs, and primates, have shown synchronized and periodic neural activities in the early stages. Immature pyramidal neurons of the rat hippocampus start to receive sequentially established synaptic inputs around birth (Tyzio et al, 1999) and the hippocampal network generates periodic synchronized firings during the first two postnatal weeks (Ben-Ari et al, 1989). Such periodic and synchronized firing of large number of neurons can lead to network oscillations that have been observed in many brain systems, such as hippocampus (Fisahn et al, 1998; Csicsvari et al, 2003), prefrontal cortex (van Aerde et al, 2008), and visual cortex (Gray et al, 1992).
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