Cross-correlations in sparsely connected recurrent networks of spiking neurons

Abstract

We study the dynamics of sparsely connected recurrent networks composed of excitatory and inhibitory integrate-and-fire (IF) neurons firing at low rates, and in particular cross-correlations (CC) between spike times of pairs of neurons using both numerical simulations and a recent theory. CCs exhibit damped oscillations with a frequency which depends on synaptic time constants. Individual CCs are shown to depend weakly on synaptic connectivity. They depend more strongly on the firing rates of individual neurons.