Emergence of preferred firing sequences in large spiking neural networks during simulated neuronal development.

Two main processes concurrently refine the nervous system over the course of development: cell death and selective synaptic pruning. We simulated large spiking neural networks (100 x 100 neurons "at birth") characterized by an early developmental phase with cell death due to excessive firing rate, followed by the onset of spike timing dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP), driven by spatiotemporal patterns of stimulation. The cell death affected the inhibitory units more than the excitatory units during the early developmental phase. The network activity showed the appearance of recurrent spatiotemporal firing patterns along the STDP phase, thus suggesting the emergence of cell assemblies from the initially randomly connected networks. Some of these patterns were detected throughout the simulation despite the activity-driven network modifications while others disappeared.