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Mapping Inhibitory Neuronal Circuits by Laser Scanning Photostimulation

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Published on: October 6, 2011

Neural correlation is stimulus modulated by feedforward inhibitory circuitry.

Jason W Middleton¹, Cyrus Omar, Brent Doiron

¹Department of Neurobiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261, USA. jmiddlet@pitt.edu

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|January 13, 2012

Summary

Neural populations in the sensory cortex maintain low spike count correlations. Local inhibition actively decorrelates neural activity, especially during sensory processing, preventing excessive neural firing.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Computational Neuroscience

Background:

Correlated neural variability impacts signal processing.
Understanding how sensory signals influence neural population correlations is crucial.
Spike count correlations are particularly important in sparsely firing neural populations, such as layer 2/3 of the sensory cortex.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how incoming sensory signals shape correlations in neural population responses.
To examine the role of local inhibition in modulating neural correlations within the sensory cortex.

Main Methods:

Studied spike count correlations in pairs of excitatory layer 2/3 neurons in rat whisker barrel cortex.
Analyzed correlations during spontaneous and sensory-evoked states.
Employed computational modeling to elucidate the decorrelating mechanisms.

Main Results:

Excitatory neuron pairs showed low spike count correlations in both spontaneous and sensory-evoked states.
Excitatory-inhibitory neuron pairs exhibited positive correlations during spontaneous activity.
Sensory stimuli actively decorrelated joint neural responses.
Local inhibition was identified as a key mechanism for decorrelation.

Conclusions:

Inhibitory population activity maintains low correlations in excitatory populations, particularly during sensory-evoked coactivation.
This study reveals a novel role for inhibition in shaping neural variability correlations.
Inhibition prevents excessive neural correlations during sensory-evoked activation, going beyond its known role in trial-averaged phenomena.