Simulation studies of the speed of recurrent processing

Lavis, R;, Panzeri, , S;, Rolls, ET;, Battaglia, FP

doi:10.1007/3-540-44597-8_24

Simulation studies of the speed of recurrent processing

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Stefano Panzeri, Ruth Lavis

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Abstract

The speed of processing in the cortex can be fast. For example, the latency of neuronal responses in the visual system increases by only approximately 10-20 ins per area in the ventral pathway sequence VI to V2 to V4 to Inferior Temporal visual cortex. Since individual neurons can be regarded as relatively slow computing elements, this may imply that such rapid processing can only be based on the feedforward connections across cortical areas. In this paper, we study this problem by using computer simulations of networks of spiking neurons. We evaluate the speed with which different architectures, namely feed-forward and recurrent architectures, retrieve information stored in the synaptic efficacy. Through the implementation of continuous dynamics, we found that recurrent processing can take as little as 10-15 ins per layer. This is much faster than obtained with simpler models of cortical processing that are based on simultaneous updating of the firing rate of the individual units. These findings suggest that cortical information processing can be very fast even when local recurrent circuits are critically involved.