Neural Computation,14:987-997
.
Stable Propagation of Activity Pulses in Populations of Spiking Neurons.
Werner Kistler and Wulfram Gerstner
We investigate the propagation of pulses of spike activity
in a neuronal network with feed-forward couplings.
The neurons are of the spike-response type
with a firing probability that depends linearly
on the membrane potential.
AFter firing neurons enter a phase of refractoriness.
Spike packets are described in terms
of the moments of the firing-time distribution
so as to allow for an analytical treatment
of the evolution of the spike packet as it propagates from
one layer to the next.
Both analytical results and simulations show
that depending on the synaptic coupling strength
a stable propagation of the packet with constant wave form
is possible.
Crucial for this observation is neither
the existence of a firing threshold nor
a sigmoidal gain function - both
are absent in our model - but
the refractory behavior of the neurons.
Keywords :
spiking neurons, integrate-and-fire model,
activity waves, synfire chain, activity pulse,
neuronal populations.
Manuscript:
Preprint (ps.Z) |