Biophysical modeling of excitation/inhibition imbalance in Alzheimer's disease
- 1Boston University
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Alzheimer's disease (AD) involves early sensory and perceptual changes that can precede memory decline. We developed a two-layer rate-based neural model of early and higher visual areas with feedforward, feedback, and recurrent connections to examine how excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance shapes visual motion perception in AD. METHODS: Using Motion-Induced Position Shift and Altered Motion Repulsion stimuli, we factorially manipulated excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) subfield power and connectivity to examine their effects on illusion representation across visual layers. RESULTS: Increased E, decreased I, and increased E/I reduced illusion representation, consistent with reduced illusion susceptibility in AD, whereas the converse increased illusion representation, reflecting neurotypical processing. Higher-level layer 2 representations were more resistant to E/I perturbations than lower-level layer 1. Illusion representation was less affected by E/I increases in intra-areal (recurrent) connectivity than in inter-areal (feedforward/feedback) connectivity. DISCUSSION: This mechanistic framework links E/I balance and connectivity to altered visual motion illusion representations in AD and suggests that E/I and connectivity measures may provide probes of early AD neurobiology. The framework may also generalize beyond vision.
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BibTeX
@misc{deng2026biophysical,
title = {{Biophysical modeling of excitation/inhibition imbalance in Alzheimer's disease}},
author = {Q. Deng and C. Chen and B. Zikopoulos and A. Yazdanbakhsh},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.30.755800},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.30.755800v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Biophysical modeling of excitation/inhibition imbalance in Alzheimer's disease
AU - Q. Deng
AU - C. Chen
AU - B. Zikopoulos
AU - A. Yazdanbakhsh
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.30.755800
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.30.755800v1
AB - INTRODUCTION: Alzheimer's disease (AD) involves early sensory and perceptual changes that can precede memory decline. We developed a two-layer rate-based neural model of early and higher visual areas with feedforward, feedback, and recurrent connections to examine how excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance shapes visual motion perception in AD. METHODS: Using Motion-Induced Position Shift and Altered Motion Repulsion stimuli, we factorially manipulated excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) subfield power and connectivity to examine their effects on illusion representation across visual layers. RESULTS: Increased E, decreased I, and increased E/I reduced illusion representation, consistent with reduced illusion susceptibility in AD, whereas the converse increased illusion representation, reflecting neurotypical processing. Higher-level layer 2 representations were more resistant to E/I perturbations than lower-level layer 1. Illusion representation was less affected by E/I increases in intra-areal (recurrent) connectivity than in inter-areal (feedforward/feedback) connectivity. DISCUSSION: This mechanistic framework links E/I balance and connectivity to altered visual motion illusion representations in AD and suggests that E/I and connectivity measures may provide probes of early AD neurobiology. The framework may also generalize beyond vision.
ER -