Dendritic Pooling of Noisy Threshold Processes Can Explain Many Properties of a Collision-Sensitive Visual Neuron

Power laws describe brain functions at many levels (from biophysics to psychophysics). It is therefore possible that they are generated by similar underlying mechanisms. Previously, the response properties of a collision-sensitive neuron were reproduced by a model which used a power law for scaling...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Keil, Matthias S.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:2445/102346
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/102346
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Neurones
Biofísica
Visió
Neurons
Biophysics
Visión
Descripción
Sumario:Power laws describe brain functions at many levels (from biophysics to psychophysics). It is therefore possible that they are generated by similar underlying mechanisms. Previously, the response properties of a collision-sensitive neuron were reproduced by a model which used a power law for scaling its inhibitory input. A common characteristic of such neurons is that they integrate information across a large part of the visual field. Here we present a biophysically plausible model of collision-sensitive neurons with η-like response properties, in which we assume that each information channel is noisy and has a response threshold. Then, an approximative power law is obtained as a result of pooling these channels. We show that with this mechanism one can successfully predict many response characteristics of the Lobula Giant Movement Detector Neuron (LGMD). Moreover, the results depend critically on noise in the inhibitory pathway, but they are fairly robust against noise in the excitatory pathway.