Sonja Gruen
Gruen Research Unit Computational Neuroscience Group RIKEN Brain Science Institute Gruen Research Unit, Computational Neuroscience Group, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako-City, Japan

Detection of coordinated network activity in massively parallel spike trains

Tuesday 13th of November 2007 at 12:00pm
508-20 Evans Hall

Multi-electrode recordings of spike trains from many neurons offer a window into how neurons work in concert to generate specific brain functions. Techniques were recently developed to record hundreds of neurons simultaneously while monkeys are performing complex behavioural tasks. These recordings allow us to observe neuronal network activity and to identify neuronal interactions reflecting the processing of information related to the performed behaviour. Data analysis methods for identifying correlated pairs or small groups of neurons are nowadays available [Riehle et al, 1997; Gruen et al, 2002a,b], but methods that enable the analysis of hundreds of neurons at a time are lacking. The identification of interacting groups composed of single neurons requires the statistical analyses for higher-order correlations. Extensions of existing correlation methods are not straightforwardly possible due to a combinatorial explosion of the parameters that need to be estimated. Here, we will discuss approaches that circumvent these obstacles. One approach detects existence of HOCs from the moments of the distribution of spike counts across neurons [Staude et al, 2007]. Another approach identifies re-occurrences of sequences of coincident firing of same neuronal groups as exhibited by the synfire chain model [Schrader et al, 2007].

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