How Oscillatory Neuronal Responses Reflect Bistability and Switching of the Hidden Assembly Dynamics

A switching between apparently coherent (oscillatory) and stochastic episodes of activity has been observed in responses from cat and monkey visual cortex. We describe the dynamics of these phenomena in two parallel approaches, a phenomenological and a rather microscopic one. On the one hand we analyze neuronal responses in terms of a hidden state model (HSM). The parameters of this model are extracted directly from experimental spike trains. They characterize the underlying dynamics as well as the coupling of individual neurons to the network. This phenomenological model thus provides a new framework for the experimental analysis of network dynamics.