Illustrative time course of neuronal activity in a bursting network with spatially non-uniform synaptic connectivity and synaptic short-term depression (see text for details).

<p>Top panel: sample time course of the average firing rate. Bottom panel: raster plot from a sub-set of 100 neurons, corresponding to the time record of the top panel. The network comprises <i>N</i> = 1000 excitatory neurons (<i>J</i>_<i>ij</i> are drawn from a Gaussian distribution with mean 0.846 mV and standard deviation of 0.211 mV), <i>δ</i>_<i>ij</i> exponentially distributed from 1 ms to 15 ms, and synapses are endowed with short-term depression with recovery time <i>τ</i>_<i>r</i> = 800 ms and synaptic release fraction <i>u</i> = 0.2 (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0118412#sec008" target="_blank">Methods</a> for details); the external current is a train of Poisson spikes with average rate <i>ν</i>_<i>ext</i> = 0.6 kHz, and synaptic efficacy randomly sampled from a Gaussian distribution of mean <i>J</i>_<i>ext</i> = 0.9 mV and standard deviation 0.225 mV.