Invited talk: "Beyond pairwise neuronal interactions"

FERNANDO MONTANI

Conferencia; XVII Conference on Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and nonlinear physics; 2012

The classical point of view is that neurons transmit information exclusively via the modulations of their mean firing rates, however it is well established that neurons can fire spike patterns with a few milliseconds of temporal precision. Thus, spike correlations across neurons exist and could have a crucial role in the neural code. Information may be carried in the brain by the correlated activity of just a few neurons, but also by a large number of neurons. We use different approaches to investigate the role of higher order correlations considering the case of just a few neurons and taking the limit a very large neuronal ensemble.