Rich spike patterns from a periodically forced Izhikevich neuron model

Physiological experiments have described the electrophysiological properties of a single neuron, and mathematical models formulating neuronal activity have been proposed to elucidate the mechanism of information processing by the brain. In the present study, we investigated one such model, the Izhikevich neuron model, stimulated by sinusoidal inputs, with the parameter sets of four principal neuron types: regular spiking, fast spiking, intrinsically bursting, and chattering neurons. We adopted three measures: the diversity index, the coefficient of variation, and the local variation, to quantify interspike intervals from different viewpoints. The combined evaluation of these three measures clarified that the positional relationship of the nullclines, which is determined by the amplitude of sinusoidal forcing, plays a crucial role in the intrinsic properties of a periodically forced Izhikevich neuron model. Moreover, we used stroboscopic plots to clarify qualitative differences between attractors. The results also imply that such combined evaluation is applicable to the classification of neurons.