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The functional significance of correlations between action potentials of neurons is still a matter of vivid debates. In particular it is presently unclear how much synchrony is caused by afferent synchronized events and how much is…
We study a network of spiking neurons with heterogeneous excitabilities connected via inhibitory delayed pulses. For globally coupled systems the increase of the inhibitory coupling reduces the number of firing neurons by following a Winner…
When a neuron breaks silence, it can emit action potentials in a number of patterns. Some responses are so sudden and intense that electrophysiologists felt the need to single them out, labeling action potentials emitted at a particularly…
If modern computers are sometimes superior to humans in some specialized tasks such as playing chess or browsing a large database, they can't beat the efficiency of biological vision for such simple tasks as recognizing and following an…
Using a realistic model of activity dependent dynamical synapses and a standard integrate and fire neuron model we study, both analytically and numerically, the conditions in which a postsynaptic neuron efficiently detects temporal…
The background activity of a cortical neural network is modeled by a homogeneous integrate-and-fire network with unreliable inhibitory synapses. Numerical and analytical calculations show that the network relaxes into a stationary state of…
In physics we often use very simple models to describe systems with many degrees of freedom, but it is not clear why or how this success can be transferred to the more complex biological context. We consider models for the joint…
A good understanding of how neurons use electrical pulses (i.e, spikes) to encode the signal information remains elusive. Analyzing spike sequences generated by individual neurons and by two coupled neurons (using the stochastic…
Sensory stimuli are usually composed of different features (the what) appearing at irregular times (the when). Neural responses often use spike patterns to represent sensory information. The what is hypothesized to be encoded in the…
In nature, animals encounter high dimensional sensory stimuli that have complex statistical and dynamical structure. Attempts to study the neural coding of these natural signals face challenges both in the selection of the signal ensemble…
A key question in neuroscience is at which level functional meaning emerges from biophysical phenomena. In most vertebrate systems, precise functions are assigned at the level of neural populations, while single-neurons are deemed…
Neural coding is a key problem in neuroscience, which can promote people's understanding of the mechanism that brain processes information. Among the classical theories of neural coding, the population rate coding has been studied widely in…
The role of synchronous firing in sensory coding and cognition remains controversial. While studies, focusing on its mechanistic consequences in attentional tasks, suggest that synchronization dynamically boosts sensory processing, others…
Although recent neurophysiological experiments suggest that synchronous neural activity is involved in some perceptual and cognitive processes, the functional role of such coherent neuronal behavior is not well understood. As a first step…
To understand possible strategies of temporal spike coding in the central nervous system, we study functional neuromimetic models of visual processing for static images. We will first present the retinal model which was introduced by Van…
The brain is characterized by a strong heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons. We report that spiking neural networks display a resonance to the heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons, with optimal input/output responsiveness occurring for levels…
We have studied neuronal synchronisation in a random network of adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire neurons. We study how spiking or bursting synchronous behaviour appears as a function of the coupling strength and the probability of…
The computation performed by a neuron can be formulated as a combination of dimensional reduction in stimulus space and the nonlinearity inherent in a spiking output. White noise stimulus and reverse correlation (the spike-triggered average…
Many systems are modulated by unknown slow processes. This hinders analysis in highly non-linear systems, such as excitable systems. We show that for such systems, if the input matches the sparse `spiky' nature of the output, the spiking…
Information needs to be appropriately encoded to be reliably transmitted over physical media. Similarly, neurons have their own codes to convey information in the brain. Even though it is well-known that neurons exchange information using a…