Action Editor: Alain Destexhe

© The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Can the topology of a recurrent spiking net-work be inferred from observed activity dynamics? Which statistical parameters of network connectivity can be extracted from firing rates, correlations and re-lated measurable quantities? To approach these ques-tions, we analyze distance dependent correlations of the activity in small-world networks of neurons with current-based synapses derived from a simple ring topology. We find that in particular the distribution of correlation coefficients of subthreshold activity can tell apart random networks from networks with dis-tance dependent connectivity. Such distributions ca