On Synchrony of Weakly Coupled Neurons at Low Firing Rate.

The dynamics of a pair of weakly interacting conductance-based neurons, firing at low frequency, ν, is investigated in the framework of the phase-reduction method. The stability of the antiphase and the in-phase locked state is studied. It is found that for a large class of conductance-based models, the antiphase state is stable (resp., unstable) for excitatory (resp., inhibitory) interactions if the synaptic time constant is above a critical value τ[sub s][sup c], which scales as | log ν | when ν goes to zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]