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Distributed synchrony

Dana H. Ballard and Zuohua Zhang

Rochester University

Data implying that neurons can communicate with synchronous volleys is difficult to reconcile with the bulk of single unit recordings which do not show synchrony yet reveal substantial correlations with behavior. Our simulation reconciles these two sets of results by sharing a synchronous signal amoung groups of neurons that are each computing probabilities. The result is that despite the underlying synchrony, the spikes produced by any particular neuron exhibit conventional receptive field properties. The simulation models a subset of the connections between the LGN and V1. It shows that synchronous computation at a high firing rate can appear at an individual cell as random spikes at a lower rate.