Characterization of activity oscillations in an excitable membrane model and their potential functionality for neuronal computations

摘要

A two-dimensional excitable membrane can be implemented as an array of interconnected neural elements. After an initial burst of activity waves, the response of such a membrane to a continuous static input is largely confined to the input area, and manifests oscillations in unit activity levels. The parameters characterizing these oscillations are sensitive to certain input features, including input extent and granularity. These properties, and the phase relationships among input regions, may potentially be used to carry out multiple aspects of visual feature extraction and visually related neural computation.