Topic: inhibitory interneurons

The effects of a global inhibition are studied on different models of neural networks, from the Wilson-Cowan model to networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. These systems typically display a region of parameter space where two different states are possible, one of low and another of high activity with a phenomenology typical of first order phase transitions, with e.g. hysteresis in correspondence of a sweep of a control parameter. The introduction of a global inhibition, given by the presence of inhibitory interneurons with very large in-degree and out-degree, leads to a smoothing of t

Cortical excitatory (E) neurons exhibit clear tuning to stimulus features, but the tuning properties of inhibitory interneurons remain ambiguous. While inhibitory neurons are traditionally viewed as functionally and structurally untuned [1-4], recent studies indicate that parvalbumin-expressing (PV) neurons do show feature selectivity and establish co-tuned reciprocal connections with individual pyramidal neurons at a pairwise level [5-7]. Using mean-field theory and large-scale network simulations of spiking cells (Fig. 1A), we reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings by demonstrating