Temporal resolution: a critical parameter in simulations of pulse-coupled neural networks

Local lateral inhibition: a key to spike synchronization?

“…3.3, we were interested in the influence of the resolution on the results and thus we performed most of the simulations with various and up to 100 times smaller increments. For all of the parameter settings investigated, we found that the quality factor r/2oo -the mean over 50 differently initialized runs -remained essentially unaffected for increments 6t ~< 0.1 ms but in a few cases the dynamics of single runs and thus the corresponding spike densities varied considerably with the temporal resolution (Kraut et al 1993;Nischwitz 1994). We took care not to present unreliable results of this sort.…”

“…The influence of deviations from these standard values on the quality of synchronization is dealt with elsewhere (Nischwitz et al 1991;Kraut et al 1993). In order to quantify the degree of synchronization, we define the instantaneous spike density ,(t-j6t) t j=O that can be imagined as a slightly lowpass-filtered recording of the whole spiking activity to which all units contribute with the same strength (cf.…”