A Digital Neural Model of Visual Deficits in Parkinson's Disease

Cortical circuits are usually modeled as a network of excitatory and inhibitory neurons with a completely regular or a random connectivity pattern. However, neuroanatomy of the macaque and the cat cortex shows that cortical neurons are organized into densely linked groups that are sparsely and reciprocally interconnected. Interesting properties arise in the average activity of an ensemble of cortical neurons when the topology of the network itself is an intrinsic parameter of the model that can vary with a given set of rules. In this work we show that both the temporal activity and the encoded rhythms in an ensemble of cortical neurons depend on the topology of the network.

[1]  Adrian M. Owen,et al.  The Strategic Control of Gaze Direction in the Tower of London Task , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[2]  Fernando J. Corbacho,et al.  Analysis of Biologically Inspired Small-World Networks , 2002, ICANN.

[3]  Geoffrey G. Lockwood,et al.  Predicting the behaviour of G-RAM networks , 2003, Neural Networks.

[4]  Sharon L. Milgram,et al.  The Small World Problem , 1967 .

[5]  I Aleksander,et al.  An extension to the hypothesis of the asynchrony of visual consciousness , 2000, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[6]  Fernando J. Corbacho,et al.  A realistic substrate for Small-world networks modeling , 2001, 12th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications.

[7]  G. Chartrand.  Introductory Graph Theory , 1984 .

[8]  L F Lago-Fernández,et al.  Fast response and temporal coherent oscillations in small-world networks. , 1999, Physical review letters.

[9]  S. Brenner,et al.  The structure of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. , 1986, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[10]  G Tononi,et al.  Theoretical neuroanatomy: relating anatomical and functional connectivity in graphs and cortical connection matrices. , 2000, Cerebral cortex.

[11]  Igor Aleksander,et al.  Neurocomputational Models of Visualisation: A Preliminary Report , 1999, IWANN.

[12]  Haim Sompolinsky,et al.  Chaotic Balanced State in a Model of Cortical Circuits , 1998, Neural Computation.

[13]  Jie Wu,et al.  Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness , 2003 .

[14]  C. Galletti,et al.  Gaze-dependent visual neurons in area V3A of monkey prestriate cortex , 1989, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[15]  William S. Yamamoto,et al.  AY's Neuroanatomy of C. elegans for Computation , 1992 .

[16]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks , 1998, Nature.

[17]  Nicolas Brunel,et al.  Dynamics of Sparsely Connected Networks of Excitatory and Inhibitory Spiking Neurons , 2000, Journal of Computational Neuroscience.