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  • Title: The role of short-term depression in sustained neural activity in the prefrontal cortex: a simulation study.
    Author: Igarashi Y, Sakumura Y, Ishii S.
    Journal: Neural Netw; 2006 Oct; 19(8):1137-52. PubMed ID: 16949792.
    Abstract:
    Recent experimental researches have suggested that sustained neural activity in the prefrontal cortex is a process of memory retention in decision making. Previous theoretical studies indicate that a balance between recurrent excitation and feedback inhibition is important for sustaining the activity. To investigate a plausible balancing mechanism, we simulated a biophysically realistic network model. Our model shows that short-term depression (STD) enables the network to sustain its activity despite the presence of long-term inhibition by GABA(B) receptors and that the sustained firing rates have a bell-shaped dependence on the degree of STD. By analyzing the neural network dynamics, we show that the bell-shaped dependence on STD is formed by destabilizing the balance with either excessive or insufficient STD. We also show that the optimal degree of STD has a linear relationship with the neural network size. These results suggest that STD provides a balancing mechanism and controls levels of sustained activities of various size networks.
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