Propagation of Synfire Activity in Cortical Networks: a Statistical Approach

Abstract

Recently it was demonstrated that the activity of the frontal cortical neurons in the awake behaving monkey comprises excessive occurences of highly accurate (~1-3 ms) spatio-temporal firing patterns. Moreover, these patterns can be related to the behavioural state of the animal. On the basis of the characteristic anatomy and physiology of the cortex, it was proposed that synfire activity, probagting through the sparsely firing cortical neural network, present a natural explanation for this phenomenon. In order to thest this hypothesis, we investigated the dependece of reliable synfire propagatoin on the structural and the dynamical properties of a model cortical network, using the newly developed simulation tool SYNOD.