Recurrent interactions in spiking networks with arbitrary topology

Abstract

The population activity of random networks of excitatory and inhibitory leaky integrate-and-fire neurons has been studied extensively. In particular, a state of asynchronous activity with low firing rates and low pairwise correlations emerges in sparsely connected networks. We apply linear response theory to evaluate the influence of detailed network structure on neuron dynamics. It turns out that pairwise correlations induced by direct and indirect network connections can be related to the matrix of direct linear interactions. Furthermore, we study the influence of the characteristics of the neuron model. Interpreting the reset as self-inhibition, we examine its influence, via the spectrum of single-neuron activity, on network autocorrelation functions and the overall correlation level. The neuron model also affects the form of interaction kernels and consequently the time-dependent correlation functions. We find that a linear instability of networks with Erdös-Rényi topology coincides with a global transition to a highly correlated network state. Our work shows that recurrent interactions have a profound impact on spike train statistics and provides tools to study the effects of specific network topologies.