Dresden 2009 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 26: Poster II
DY 26.11: Poster
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 16:00–18:00, P1A
Nonlinear Response of a Spiking Neuron to a Transient Stimulus — •Tilo Schwalger1,3, Sven Goedeke2, and Markus Diesmann2,3 — 1MPI PKS, Dresden — 2BCCN, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg — 3RIKEN BSI, Wako, Japan
The propagation of synchronous firing activity along a feed-forward neural network has served as a model to explain precise spatio-temporal spike patterns in the cortex ("synfire chain"). The analytical description of the traveling activity pulse requires the knowledge of the single neuron response to a transient stimulus in the presence of background noise. This involves, however, a first-passage-time problem of a time-inhomogeneous stochastic process, which is difficult to solve.
Here, we present an explicit formula for the time-dependent firing rate of a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron in response to an arbitrarily strong, transient stimulus. With this formula one can accurately predict the expected response of a population of neurons to an incoming activity pulse, which permits to construct a map between the firing responses of subsequent neuron groups. This allows us to study the pulse propagation along the feed-forward network analytically. The theory is based on the Wiener-Rice series of differentiable processes.