Neuronal avalanche dynamics regulated by spike-timing-dependent plasticity under different topologies and heterogeneities.

Abstract

Neuronal avalanches, a critical state of network self-organization, have been widely observed in electrophysiological records at different signal levels and spatial scales of the brain, which has significant influence on information transmission and processing in the brain. In this paper, the collective behavior of neuron firing is studied based on Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model and we induce spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) to update the connection weight through competition between adjacent neurons in different network topologies. The result shows that STDP can facilitate the synchronization of the network and increase the probability of large-scale neuron avalanche obviously. Moreover, both the structure of STDP and network connection density can affect the generation of avalanche critical states, specifically, learning rate has positive correlation effect on the slope of power-law distribution and time constant has negative correction on it. However, when we the increase of heterogeneity in network, STDP can only has obvious promotion in synchrony under suitable level of heterogeneity. And we find that the process of long-term potentiation is sensitive to the adjustment of time constant and learning rate, unlike long-term depression, which is only sensitive to learning rate in heterogeneity network. It is suggested that presented results could facilitate our understanding on synchronization in various neural networks under the effect of STDP learning rules.