Neuron
Volume 67, Issue 2, 29 July 2010, Pages 308-320
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Article
Oscillations and Filtering Networks Support Flexible Routing of Information

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.06.019Get rights and content
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Summary

The mammalian brain exhibits profuse interregional connectivity. How information flow is rapidly and flexibly switched among connected areas remains poorly understood. Task-dependent changes in the power and interregion coherence of network oscillations suggest that such oscillations play a role in signal routing. We show that switching one of several convergent pathways from an asynchronous to an oscillatory state allows accurate selective transmission of population-coded information, which can be extracted even when other convergent pathways fire asynchronously at comparable rates. We further show that the band-pass filtering required to perform this information extraction can be implemented in a simple spiking network model with a single feed-forward interneuron layer. This constitutes a mechanism for flexible signal routing in neural circuits, which exploits sparsely synchronized network oscillations and temporal filtering by feed-forward inhibition.

Highlights

► We report a mechanism for selective routing of population-coded signals ► Spatial rate codes can be reproduced as oscillation amplitude patterns ► A feed-forward interneuron layer can be tuned to act as a band-pass filter ► We show how multiple population codes can be represented in parallel by oscillations

SYSNEURO
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SIGNALING

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