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Temporal whitening by power-law adaptation in neocortical neurons

Nature Neuroscience volume 16, pages 942–948 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Spike-frequency adaptation (SFA) is widespread in the CNS, but its function remains unclear. In neocortical pyramidal neurons, adaptation manifests itself by an increase in the firing threshold and by adaptation currents triggered after each spike. Combining electrophysiological recordings in mice with modeling, we found that these adaptation processes lasted for more than 20 s and decayed over multiple timescales according to a power law. The power-law decay associated with adaptation mirrored and canceled the temporal correlations of input current received in vivo at the somata of layer 2/3 somatosensory pyramidal neurons. These findings suggest that, in the cortex, SFA causes temporal decorrelation of output spikes (temporal whitening), an energy-efficient coding procedure that, at high signal-to-noise ratio, improves the information transfer.

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Figure 1: Spiking neuron model GLIF-ξ and experimental protocol.
Figure 2: Power-law adaptation filters extracted from in vitro recordings.
Figure 3: The GLIF-ξL model predicts the occurrence of single spikes with millisecond precision.
Figure 4: The GLIF-ξL model accurately predicts the firing rate response on multiple timescales.
Figure 5: Power-law adaptation is near-optimally tuned to perform temporal whitening.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C.C.H. Petersen, B.N. Lundstrom, G. Hennequin and A. Seeholzer for helpful discussions. We are also grateful to S. Crochet for sharing in vivo recordings and to B.N. Lundstrom for sharing the data that inspired this work. Finally, we thank S. Naskar for his help with the in vitro recordings. This project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 200020 132871/1; C.P. and S.M.) and by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (BrainScaleS, grant no. 269921; S.M. and R.N.).

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  1. School of Computer and Communication Sciences and School of Life Science, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Christian Pozzorini, Richard Naud, Skander Mensi & Wulfram Gerstner

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  1. Christian Pozzorini
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Contributions

C.P. and R.N. conceived the study. C.P. designed the experiments, analyzed the data, performed the modeling and wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. S.M. contributed to data analysis and modeling. W.G. supervised the project. All of the authors worked on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Christian Pozzorini.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Data Preprocessing and Supplementary Modeling (PDF 1911 kb)

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Pozzorini, C., Naud, R., Mensi, S. et al. Temporal whitening by power-law adaptation in neocortical neurons. Nat Neurosci 16, 942–948 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3431

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