From space to time: Spatial inhomogeneities lead to the emergence of spatiotemporal sequences in spiking neuronal networks.

• Main Authors: Sebastian Spreizer, Ad Aertsen, Arvind Kumar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2019-10-01
• Series: PLoS Computational Biology
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007432

Spatio-temporal sequences of neuronal activity are observed in many brain regions in a variety of tasks and are thought to form the basis of meaningful behavior. However, mechanisms by which a neuronal network can generate spatio-temporal activity sequences have remained obscure. Existing models are biologically untenable because they either require manual embedding of a feedforward network within a random network or supervised learning to train the connectivity of a network to generate sequences. Here, we propose a biologically plausible, generative rule to create spatio-temporal activity sequences in a network of spiking neurons with distance-dependent connectivity. We show that the emergence of spatio-temporal activity sequences requires: (1) individual neurons preferentially project a small fraction of their axons in a specific direction, and (2) the preferential projection direction of neighboring neurons is similar. Thus, an anisotropic but correlated connectivity of neuron groups suffices to generate spatio-temporal activity sequences in an otherwise random neuronal network model.