Simple-spike synchrony between Purkinje cells projecting to a common neuron in the deep cerebellar nucleus is emerging as an important factor in the encoding of output information from cerebellar cortex. A phenomenon known as stochastic synchronization happens when uncoupled oscillators synchronize due to correlated inputs. Stochastic synchronization is a viable mechanism through which simple-spike synchrony could be generated, but it has received scarce attention, perhaps because the presence of feedforward inhibition in the input to Purkinje cells makes insights difficult. This paper presents a method to account for feedforward inhibition so the usual mathematical approaches to stochastic synchronization can be applied. The method consists in finding a single Phase Response Curve, called the equivalent PRC, that accounts for the effects of both excitatory inputs and delayed feedforward inhibition from molecular layer interneurons. The results suggest that a theory of stochastic synchronization for the case of feedforward inhibition may not be necessary, since this case can be approximately reduced to the case of inputs characterized by a single PRC. Moreover, feedforward inhibition could in many situations increase the level of synchrony experienced by Purkinje cells.

中文翻译：

---

具有前馈抑制作用的浦肯野细胞的随机同步可以用等效的相位响应曲线研究。

投射到小脑深部共同神经元的Purkinje细胞之间的简单尖峰同步正在成为编码小脑皮层输出信息的重要因素。当未耦合的振荡器由于相关的输入而同步时，会发生一种称为随机同步的现象。随机同步是一种可行的机制，通过该机制可以生成简单的尖峰同步，但是它却很少受到关注，这可能是因为在浦肯野细胞输入中存在前馈抑制作用使洞察变得困难。本文提出了一种解决前馈抑制的方法，因此可以应用通常的数学方法进行随机同步。该方法包括找到单个相响应曲线，称为等效PRC，这说明了兴奋性输入和分子层间神经元对延迟前馈抑制的影响。结果表明，对于前馈抑制情况，可能不需要随机同步理论，因为这种情况可以近似地简化为以单个PRC为特征的输入情况。此外，前馈抑制可能在许多情况下增加浦肯野细胞经历的同步水平。