Two Sites of Synaptic Integration: Relevant for Learning?

Since the classical work of D. O. Hebb [1] it has been assumed that synaptic plasticity solely depends on the activity of the pre- and the postsynaptic cell. Synapses influence the plasticity of other synapses exclusively via the postsynaptic activity. This confounds effects on synaptic plasticity and neuronal activation and therefore makes it difficult to implement networks, which optimize a global measure of performance. Exploring solutions to this problem, inspired by recent research on the properties of apical dendrites, we examine a network of neurons with two sites of synaptic integration. They communicate in such a way that one set of synapses mainly influences the neurons activity, the other set gates synaptic plasticity. In such a framework it is easy to implement mechanisms for maximization of coherent information; neurons with nonoverlapping receptive fields learn to fire correlated and preferentially transmit information that is correlated over space. Furthermore a new mea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IJCNN
• Authors: Konrad P. Körding, Peter König
• Keywords: Gates Synaptic Plasticity, IJCNN 2000, Neural Networks, Synapses, Synaptic Plasticity