  We investigate the synchronization properties between two excitatory coupled
neurons in the presence of an inhibitory loop mediated by an interneuron.
Dynamical inhibition together with noise independently applied to each neuron
provide phase diversity in the dynamics of the neuronal motif. We show that the
interplay between the coupling strengths and external noise controls the phase
relations between the neurons in a counter-intuitive way. For a master-slave
configuration (unidirectional coupling) we find that the slave can anticipate
the master, on average, if the slave is subject to the inhibitory feedback. In
this non-usual regime, called anticipated synchronization (AS), the phase of
the post-synaptic neuron is advanced with respect to that of the pre-synaptic
neuron. We also show that the AS regime survives even in the presence of
unbalanced bidirectional excitatory coupling. Moreover, for the symmetric
mutually coupled situation, the neuron that is subject to the inhibitory loop
leads in phase.
