Possible Roles of Electrical Synapse in Temporal Information Processing: A Computational Study

Temporal information processing in the range of tens to hundreds of milliseconds is critical in many forms of sensory and motor tasks. However, little has been known about the neural mechanisms of temporal information processing. In the present study, we explore the possible roles of electrical synapses in processing the duration information of external stimuli in the neural system by constructing neural networks. Our results suggest that neural networks with electrical synapses functioning together with chemical synapses can effectively work for the temporal-to-spatial transformation of neuronal activities, and the spatially distributed sequential neural activities can potentially represent temporal information.