Effect of intermodular connection on fast sparse synchronization in clustered small-world neural networks

Effect of interpopulation spike-timing-dependent plasticity on synchronized rhythms in neuronal networks with inhibitory and excitatory populations

We consider a two-population network consisting of both inhibitory (I) interneurons and excitatory (E) pyramidal cells. This I-E neuronal network has adaptive dynamic I to E and E to I interpopulation synaptic strengths, governed by interpopulation spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). In previous works without STDPs, fast sparsely synchronized rhythms, related to diverse cognitive functions, were found to appear in a range of noise intensity D for static synaptic strengths. Here, by varying D, we investigate the effect of interpopulation STDPs on fast sparsely synchronized rhythms that emerge in both the I- and the E-populations. Depending on values of D, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) for population-averaged values of saturated interpopulation synaptic strengths are found to occur. Then, the degree of fast sparse synchronization varies due to effects of LTP and LTD. In a broad region of intermediate D, the degree of good synchronization (with higher synchronization degree) becomes decreased, while in a region of large D, the degree of bad synchronization (with lower synchronization degree) gets increased. Consequently, in each I- or E-population, the synchronization degree becomes nearly the same in a wide range of D (including both the intermediate and the large D regions). This kind of "equalization effect" is found to occur via cooperative interplay between the average occupation and pacing degrees of spikes (i.e., the average fraction of firing neurons and the average degree of phase coherence between spikes in each synchronized stripe of spikes in the raster plot of spikes) in fast sparsely synchronized rhythms. Finally, emergences of LTP and LTD of interpopulation synaptic strengths (leading to occurrence of equalization effect) are intensively investigated via a microscopic method based on the distributions of time delays between the pre- and the post-synaptic spike times.