Spatiotemporal Memory Is an Intrinsic Property of Networks of Dissociated Cortical Neurons
Submitted by Kevin Sean Chen on
Following Tina's presentation last time, this article was published by the same group this year and they moved on to investigate spatiotemporal memory properties in the cultured neural network. I think some ideas and results in the article may be informative for the work on retina and the future works in cultured neurons in our group.
The cortical neurons were cultured on MEA, transfected by ChR2 (an optogentetic light-sensitive ion channel), and stimulated by laser patterns generated through spatial light modulator. Four jittered light pulses and forty different "music" (4 "notes" presented with different spatial patterns) stimuli were design to verify the ability for neural network to memories and classify these inputs, and the classification accuracy for output spikes from the MEA recordings were compared with the liquid-state machine.
In result, they conclude that cultured neural networks are able to accumulate information and eventually classify different types of light stimuli, utilizing spatial temporal information. Such ability to maintain information to classify input is an intrinsic property. In addition, they also indicate how bursts might wash out information for classification and also how STSP may be important for spatiotemporal memory in the network.