The Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Freiburg

Announcement for the next

BCCN Seminar

Prof. Carl van Vreeswijk

René Descartes University
Paris
France

The effect of shunting inhibition in an analytically tractable model of a spatially extended spiking neuron

I present a simple model of a spatially extended spiking neuron which can be studied analytically. The model consists of a soma, modeled as an integrate and fire neuron, coupled to a passive dendritic cable. I show how this model can be analyzed. The basic properties of the model are presented and I determine how shunting inhibition at different locations affect the transfer function of the neuron. Somatic shunting inhibition shifts the transfer function to the right, reminicent to the results for single compartment models. Dendritic shunting inhibition has a weak subtractive effect for inputs that arrive at the soma. For dendritic excitatory inputs the results depend on the distribution of the excitatory and inhibitory inputs. There are configurations in which shunting inhibition shifts the transfer function to the right, ones for which the transfer function is shifted downward, ones which have a multiplicative effect on the gain for a given input level and also ones which multiply the gain at a given firing rate.

Host: Prof. Ad Aertsen