Measuring Synaptic Interactions

Science - 1994-03-04Fetz EE, Shupe LE, Georgopoulos AP, Taira M, Lukashin A
A.P. Georgopoulos et al. present novel evidence which suggests that synaptic interactions between pairs of cortical neurons are directly related to the degree to which they fire together during directed limb movements. The cover for the issue of 2 April depicts synaptic interactions ranging form strongly excitatory (for cells with similiar direction preferences) to strongly inhibitory (for cells with opposite direcction preference). The calculation used by Georgopooulos et al. to document synaptic interaction differs from the cross correlation traditionally used to measure the effects of synaptic connections on firing probability. Instead, they "estimated the strength of presumed interaction (synaptic weight) from the i-th to the j-th neuron in a pair using an analysis based on waiting time probability density function...".