Sub-threshold neuronal activity and the dynamical regime of cerebral cortex

Oren Amsalem, Hidehiko Inagaki, Jianing Yu, Karel Svoboda, Ran Darshan*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Cortical neurons exhibit temporally irregular spiking patterns and heterogeneous firing rates. These features arise in model circuits operating in a ‘fluctuation-driven regime’, in which fluctuations in membrane potentials emerge from the network dynamics. However, it is still debated whether the cortex operates in such a regime. We evaluated the fluctuation-driven hypothesis by analyzing spiking and sub-threshold membrane potentials of neurons in the frontal cortex of mice performing a decision-making task. We showed that while standard fluctuation-driven models successfully account for spiking statistics, they fall short in capturing the heterogeneity in sub-threshold activity. This limitation is an inevitable outcome of bombarding single-compartment neurons with a large number of pre-synaptic inputs, thereby clamping the voltage of all neurons to more or less the same average voltage. To address this, we effectively incorporated dendritic morphology into the standard models. Inclusion of dendritic morphology in the neuronal models increased neuronal selectivity and reduced error trials, suggesting a functional role for dendrites during decision-making. Our work suggests that, during decision-making, cortical neurons in high-order cortical areas operate in a fluctuation-driven regime.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7958
JournalNature Communications
Volume15
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2024

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