Neuronal Circuits Underlying Persistent Representations Despite Time Varying Activity

摘要: Summary Background Our brains are capable of remarkably stable stimulus representations despite time-varying neural activity. For instance, during delay periods in working memory tasks, while stimuli represented memory, neurons the prefrontal cortex, thought to support representation, exhibit neuronal Since activity encodes stimulus, its dynamics appears be paradoxical and incompatible with network representations. Indeed, this finding raises a fundamental question: can only encoded activity, or, corollary, is every change a sign representation? Results Here we explain how different offered by individual woven together to form coherent, time-invariant, representation. Motivated by two ubiquitous features neocortex—redundancy representation sparse intracortical connections—we derive architecture that resolves apparent contradiction between stability changing Unexpectedly, exhibits many structural properties have been measured in cortical sensory areas. In particular, account for few-neuron motifs, synapse weight distribution, relations functional connection probability. Conclusions We show intuition regarding typically derived from considering single neurons, may misleading distributed cortical circuits does not necessarily imply explicitly properties.