Effect of Small-World Connectivity on Fast Sparsely Synchronized Cortical Rhythms

Abstract

Fast cortical rhythms with stochastic and intermittent neural discharges have been observed in electric recordings of brain activity. Recently, Brunel et al. developed a framework to describe this kind of fast sparse synchronization in both random and globally-coupled networks of suprathreshold spiking neurons. However, in a real cortical circuit, synaptic connections are known to have complex topology which is neither regular nor random. Hence, in order to extend the works of Brunel et al. to realistic neural networks, we study the effect of network architecture on these fast sparsely synchronized rhythms in an inhibitory population of suprathreshold fast spiking (FS) Izhikevich interneurons. We first employ the conventional Erd\"{o}s-Renyi random graph of suprathreshold FS Izhikevich interneurons for modeling the complex connectivity in neural systems, and study emergence of the population synchronized states by varying both the synaptic inhibition strength $J$ and the noise intensity $D$. Thus, fast sparsely synchronized states of relatively high degree are found to appear for large values of $J$ and $D$. Second, for fixed values of $J$ and $D$ where fast sparse synchronization occurs in the random network, we consider the Watts-Strogatz small-world network of suprathreshold FS Izhikevich interneurons which interpolates between regular lattice and random graph via rewiring, and investigate the effect of small-world synaptic connectivity on emergence of fast sparsely synchronized rhythms by varying the rewiring probability $p$ from short-range to long-range connection. When passing a small critical value $p^*_c$ $(\simeq 0.12)$, fast sparsely synchronized population rhythms are found to emerge in small-world networks with predominantly local connections and rare long-range connections.