Synaptic depression and the temporal response characteristics of V1 cells

We explore the effects of short-term synaptic depression on the temporal dynamics of V1 responses to visual images by constructing a model simple cell. Synaptic depression is modeled on the basis of previous detailed fits to experimental data. A component of synaptic depression operating in the range of hundreds of milliseconds can account for a number of the unique temporal characteristics of cortical neurons, including the bandpass nature of frequency-response curves, increases in response amplitude and in cutoff frequency for transient stimuli, nonlinear temporal summation, and contrast-dependent shifts in response phase. Synaptic depression also provides a mechanism for generating the temporal phase shifts needed to produce direction selectivity, and a model constructed along these lines matches both extracellular and intracellular data. A slower component of depression can reproduce the effects of contrast adaptation.