title: Spike onset dynamics and response speed in neuronal populations.
abstract: Recent studies of cortical neurons driven by fluctuating currents revealed cutoff frequencies for action potential encoding of several hundred Hz. Theoretical studies of biophysical neuron models have predicted a much lower cutoff frequency of the order of average firing rate or the inverse membrane time constant. The biophysical origin of the observed high cutoff frequencies is thus not well understood. Here we introduce a neuron model with dynamical action potential generation, in which the linear response can be analytically calculated for uncorrelated synaptic noise. We find that the cutoff frequencies increase to very large values when the time scale of action potential initiation becomes short.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Faculty of Physics, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen, 37073 Germany.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Fred
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wolf
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D007700:Kinetics; D008954:Models, Biological; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology*