Effects of different connectivity patterns in a model of cortical circuits

Abstract

Cortical circuits are usually modeled as a network of excitatory and inhibitory neurons with a completely regular or a random connectivity pattern. However, neuroanatomy of the macaque and the cat cortex shows that cortical neurons are organized into densely linked groups that are sparsely and reciprocally interconnected. Interesting properties arise in the average activity of an ensemble of cortical, neurons when the topology of the network itself is an intrinsic parameter of the model that can vary with a given set of rules. In this work we show that both the temporal activity and the encoded rhythms in an ensemble of cortical neurons depend on the topology of the network. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.