Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 4 (NIPS 1991)
Mark R. Sydorenko, Eric Young
Based on a general non-stationary point process model, we computed estimates of the synaptic coupling strength (efficacy) as a function of time after stimulus onset between an inhibitory interneuron and its target postsynaptic cell in the feline dorsal cochlear nucleus. The data consist of spike trains from pairs of neurons responding to brief tone bursts recorded in vivo. Our results suggest that the synaptic efficacy is non-stationary. Further. synaptic efficacy is shown to be inversely and approximately linearly related to average presynaptic spike rate. A second-order analysis suggests that the latter result is not due to non-linear interactions. Synaptic efficacy is less strongly correlated with postsynaptic rate and the correlation is not consistent across neural pairs.