The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Alexander C. Roxin to work with Dr. Nicolas Brunel at University Rene Descartes in Paris, France. Support is provided by the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate's Office of Multi-disciplinary Activities.
Computational models of neural systems, based on differential equations describing the electrophysiological properties of neurons, have become an important tool in understanding the central nervous system. A major thrust of work on large-scale neural networks in recent years has been on working memory in mammalian pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Working memory, the ability to hold information for just long enough to complete a related task, is evidenced in the brain of live monkeys by an elevated firing rate of some neurons in the PFC. One of the great unknowns in the cerebral cortex is the actual distribution of functional synaptic connections and the role that various distributions might play. The goal of this project is to study and understand the role of different synaptic distributions in a model of working memory by means of analytical and numerical methods. A systematic characterization of the emerging activity in a network of spiking neurons as a function of excitatory and inhibitory connections will prove important not only for PFC, but other regions of the cerebral cortex as well. The work proposed here will address activity in the PFC which has implications for the higher-order processing common to advanced primates. Ultimately, it is a necessary step in beginning to understand the neural correlate of intelligent animal behavior.
