How stochastic synchrony could work in cerebellar Purkinje cells

TL;DR

This paper explores how stochastic synchronization might generate simple spike synchrony in cerebellar Purkinje cells, accounting for feedforward inhibition and key factors influencing synchronization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate feedforward inhibition into stochastic synchronization models and discusses how various factors affect Purkinje cell synchrony.

Findings

Feedforward inhibition complicates synchronization modeling.

Input correlation, heterogeneity, and PRC shape influence synchronization.

Stochastic synchrony may play a role in cerebellar output encoding.

Abstract

Simple spike synchrony between Purkinje cells projecting to a common neuron in the deep cerebellar nucleus is emerging as an important factor in the encoding of output information from cerebellar cortex. Stochastic synchronization is a viable mechanism through which this synchrony could be generated, but it has received scarce attention, perhaps because the presence of feedforward inhibition in the input to Purkinje cells makes insights difficult. This paper presents a method to account for feedforward inhibition so the usual mathematical approaches to stochastic synchronization can be applied. Three concepts (input correlation, heterogeneity, and PRC shape) are then introduced to facilitate an intuitive understanding of how different factors can affect synchronization in Purkinje cells. This is followed by a discussion of how stochastic synchrony could play a role in the cerebellar response under different assumptions.