Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Research Visitors

Visits of International Scientists

• Paul Bressloff, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Utah visited the team in June-July as part of his Inria International chair.

• Ruben Herzog, Master student in Valparaiso, with A. Palacios, Centro Interdisciplinario de Neurociencia de Valparaíso, Univ de Valparaíso, Valparaíso. From May 4 th 2015 until May 29 th 2015.

Internships

Roberta Evangelista

During her internship (May 2015-September 2015, funded by Action Transverse) supervised by E. Tanré (Tosca) and R. Veltz (Neuromathcomp), Roberta Evangelista worked on “A stochastic model of gamma phase modulated orientation selectivity”.

Neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) are known to be highly selective for stimulus orientation. Recent experimental evidence has shown that, in awake monkeys, the orientation selectivity of V1 neurons is modulated by gamma oscillations. In particular, neurons’ firing rate in response to the preferred orientation changes as a function of the gamma phase of spiking. The effect is drastically reduced for non-preferred orientations. We have introduced a stochastic model of a network of orientation-dependent excitatory and inhibitory spiking neurons. We have found conditions on the parameters such that the solutions of the mathematical model reproduce the experimental behavior.

Quentin Cormier

Quentin is co-supervised by E. Tanré (Tosca) and R. Veltz (Neuromathcomp). He is a Master 1 student from ENS Lyon.

We study numerically and theoretically a model of spiking neuron in interaction with plasticity. The synaptic weights evolve according to biological law of plasticity. We study the existence of separable time scales. We are also interested in the characterization of invariant distribution for the activity of the network and the distribution of the synaptic weights. During his internship, Quentin Cormier also develop a numerical code to simulate large networks of neurons evolving according to this dynamics.