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This video was recorded at 5th European Conference on Complex Systems . Persistent activity observed in neurophysiological experiments in monkeys is thought to be the neuronal correlate of working memory. Over the last decade, network modelers have strived to reproduce the main features of these experiments. In particular, attractor network models have been proposed in which there is a coexistence between a non-selective attractor state with low background activity with selective attractor states in which sub-groups of neurons fire at rates which are higher (but not much higher) than background rates. A recent detailed statistical analysis of the data seems however to challenge such attractor models: the data indicates that firing during persistent activity is highly irregular (with an average CV larger than 1), while models predict a more regular firing process (CV smaller than 1). I will discuss how this feature can be reproduced in a network of excitatory leakly integrate-and-fire neurons.

Disciplines:

• Social Sciences