Volume 3


1. On the long time behaviour of single stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley neurons with constant signal, and a construction of circuits of interacting neurons showing self-organized rhythmic oscillations

Reinhard Höpfner.
The stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley neurons considered in this paper replace time-constant deterministic input $a dt$ of the classical deterministic model by increments $\vartheta dt + dX_t$ of a stochastic process: $X$ is Ornstein-Uhlenbeck with volatility $\sigma>0$ and backdriving force $\tau>0$, and we call $\vartheta>0$ the signal. We have ergodicity and strong laws of large numbers for various functionals of the process, and characterize 'quiet behaviour' and 'regular spiking' as events whose probability depends on the parameters $(\tau,\sigma)$ and on the signal $\vartheta$. The notions of quiet behaviour and regular spiking allow for a construction of circuits of interacting stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley neurons, combining excitation with inhibition according to a bloc structure along the circuit, on which self-organized rhythmic oscillations can be observed.

2. Gabor frames from contact geometry in models of the primary visual cortex

Vasiliki Liontou ; Matilde Marcolli.
We analyze the interplay between contact geometry and Gabor filters signal analysis in geometric models of the primary visual cortex. We show in particular that a specific framed lattice and an associated Gabor system is determined by the Legendrian circle bundle structure of the $3$-manifold of contact elements on a surface (which models the V1-cortex), together with the presence of an almost-complex structure on the tangent bundle of the surface (which models the retinal surface). We identify a scaling of the lattice, also dictated by the manifold geometry, that ensures the frame condition is satisfied. We then consider a $5$-dimensional model where receptor profiles also involve a dependence on frequency and scale variables, in addition to the dependence on position and orientation. In this case we show that a proposed profile window function does not give rise to frames (even in a distributional sense), while a natural modification of the same generates Gabor frames with respect to the appropriate lattice determined by the contact geometry.

3. Propagation of chaos in mean field networks of FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons

Laetitia Colombani ; Pierre Le Bris.
In this article, we are interested in the behavior of a fully connected network of $N$ neurons, where $N$ tends to infinity. We assume that the neurons follow the stochastic FitzHugh-Nagumo model, whose specificity is the non-linearity with a cubic term. We prove a result of uniform in time propagation of chaos of this model in a mean-field framework. We also exhibit explicit bounds. We use a coupling method initially suggested by A. Eberle (arXiv:1305.1233), and recently extended in (1805.11387), known as the reflection coupling. We simultaneously construct a solution of the $N$-particle system and $N$ independent copies of the non-linear McKean-Vlasov limit in such a way that, considering an appropriate semi-metric that takes into account the various possible behaviors of the processes, the two solutions tend to get closer together as $N$ increases, uniformly in time. The reflection coupling allows us to deal with the non-convexity of the underlying potential in the dynamics of the quantities defining our network, and show independence at the limit for the system in mean field interaction with sufficiently small Lipschitz continuous interactions.

4. Neural Coding as a Statistical Testing Problem

Guilherme Ost ; Patricia Reynaud-Bouret.
We take the testing perspective to understand what the minimal discrimination time between two stimuli is for different types of rate coding neurons. Our main goal is to describe the testing abilities of two different encoding systems: place cells and grid cells. In particular, we show, through the notion of adaptation, that a fixed place cell system can have a minimum discrimination time that decreases when the stimuli are further away. This could be a considerable advantage for the place cell system that could complement the grid cell system, which is able to discriminate stimuli that are much closer than place cells.