Temporal integration in recurrent microcircuits
INTRODUCTION An essential feature of neural computation in behaving organisms is the capability to produce at any time t a response ) (t y that depends on sensory and internal inputs ) (s u that the system received at various times t s < back in the past. Such any-time intelligent response to temporally integrated input, which does not have to wait until some algorithm has completed its computation, is also desirable for artificial computing machinery. It would therefore be helpful to understand how neural systems solve this task. Because of the stereotypical features of cortical microcircuits (see [De Felipe, 1997], [Douglas et al., 1998], [Shepherd, 1988], [Thomson et al., 2002], [von Melchner et al., 2000]) one may hypothesize that there exists a common principle by which neural microcircuits in different cortical areas and species solve the task of adaptive real-time response to temporally integrated information. We will survey in this article the primary models that have been proposed for temporal integration in neural microcircuits of the cortex.