Coherent activity in excitatory pulse-coupled networks

An excitatory pulse-coupled neural network is a network composed of neurons coupled via excitatory synapses, where the coupling among the neurons is mediated by the transmission of excitatory post-synaptic potentials (EPSPs). The coherent activity of a neuronal population usually indicates that some form of correlation is present in the firing of the considered neurons. The article focuses on the influence of dilution on the collective dynamics of these networks: a diluted network is a network where connections have been randomly pruned. Two kind of dilution are examined: massively connected versus sparse networks. A massively (sparse) connected network is characterized by an average connectivity which grows proportionally to (does not depend on) the system size.