title: Synaptic plasticity and neuronal refractory time cause scaling behaviour of neuronal avalanches.
abstract: Neuronal avalanches measured in vitro and in vivo in different cortical networks consistently exhibit power law behaviour for the size and duration distributions with exponents typical for a mean field self-organized branching process. These exponents are also recovered in neuronal network simulations implementing various neuronal dynamics on different network topologies. They can therefore be considered a very robust feature of spontaneous neuronal activity. Interestingly, this scaling behaviour is also observed on regular lattices in finite dimensions, which raises the question about the origin of the mean field behavior observed experimentally. In this study we provide an answer to this open question by investigating the effect of activity dependent plasticity in combination with the neuronal refractory time in a neuronal network. Results show that the refractory time hinders backward avalanches forcing a directed propagation. Hebbian plastic adaptation plays the role of sculpting these directed avalanche patterns into the topology of the network slowly changing it into a branched structure where loops are marginal.
authors.affiliation: ETH Zürich, Computational Physics for Engineering Materials, IfB, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Michiels van Kessenich
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Industrial and Information Engineering, Second University of Naples, Aversa (CE), Italy.|INFN sez. Naples, Gr. Coll. Salerno (Italy).
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: de Arcangelis
authors.affiliation: ETH Zürich, Computational Physics for Engineering Materials, IfB, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Herrmann
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*