scholarly journals STDP and the distribution of preferred phases in the whisker system

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. e1009353
Author(s):  
Nimrod Sherf ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rats and mice use their whiskers to probe the environment. By rhythmically swiping their whiskers back and forth they can detect the existence of an object, locate it, and identify its texture. Localization can be accomplished by inferring the whisker’s position. Rhythmic neurons that track the phase of the whisking cycle encode information about the azimuthal location of the whisker. These neurons are characterized by preferred phases of firing that are narrowly distributed. Consequently, pooling the rhythmic signal from several upstream neurons is expected to result in a much narrower distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population, which however has not been observed empirically. Here, we show how spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide a solution to this conundrum. We investigated the effect of STDP on the utility of a neural population to transmit rhythmic information downstream using the framework of a modeling study. We found that under a wide range of parameters, STDP facilitated the transfer of rhythmic information despite the fact that all the synaptic weights remained dynamic. As a result, the preferred phase of the downstream neuron was not fixed, but rather drifted in time at a drift velocity that depended on the preferred phase, thus inducing a distribution of preferred phases. We further analyzed how the STDP rule governs the distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population. This link between the STDP rule and the distribution of preferred phases constitutes a natural test for our theory.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimrod Sherf ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rats and mice use their whiskers to probe the environment. By rhythmically swiping their whiskers back and forth they can detect the existence of an object, locate it, and identify its texture. Localization can be accomplished by inferring the position of the whisker. Rhythmic neurons that track the phase of the whisking cycle encode information about the azimuthal location of the whisker. These neurons are characterized by preferred phases of firing that are narrowly distributed. Consequently, pooling the rhythmic signal from several upstream neurons is expected to result in a much narrower distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population, which however has not been observed empirically. Here, we show how spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide a solution to this conundrum. We investigated the effect of STDP on the utility of a neural population to transmit rhythmic information downstream using the framework of a modeling study. We found that under a wide range of parameters, STDP facilitated the transfer of rhythmic information despite the fact that all the synaptic weights remained dynamic. As a result, the preferred phase of the downstream neuron was not fixed, but rather drifted in time at a drift velocity that depended on the preferred phase, thus inducing a distribution of preferred phases. We further analyzed how the STDP rule governs the distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population. This link between the STDP rule and the distribution of preferred phases constitutes a natural test for our theory.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarit Soloduchin ◽  
Maoz Shamir

AbstractNeuronal oscillatory activity has been reported in relation to a wide range of cognitive processes. In certain cases changes in oscillatory activity has been associated with pathological states. Although the specific role of these oscillations has yet to be determined, it is clear that neuronal oscillations are abundant in the central nervous system. These observations raise the question of the origin of these oscillations; and specifically whether the mechanisms responsible for the generation and stabilization of these oscillations are genetically hard-wired or whether they can be acquired via a learning process.Here we focus on spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) to investigate whether oscillatory activity can emerge in a neuronal network via an unsupervised learning process of STDP dynamics, and if so, what features of the STDP learning rule govern and stabilize the resultant oscillatory activity?Here, the STDP dynamics of the effective coupling between two competing neuronal populations with reciprocal inhibitory connections was analyzed using the phase-diagram of the system that depicts the possible dynamical states of the network as a function of the effective inhibitory couplings. This phase diagram yields a rich repertoire of possible dynamical behaviors including regions of different fixed point solutions, bi-stability and a region in which the system exhibits oscillatory activity. STDP introduces dynamics for the inhibitory couplings themselves and hence induces a flow in the phase diagram. We investigate the conditions for the flow to converge to an oscillatory state of the neuronal network and then characterize how the features of the STDP rule govern and stabilize these oscillations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabi Socolovsky ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rhythmic activity in the gamma band (30-100Hz) has been observed in numerous animal species ranging from insects to humans, and in relation to a wide range of cognitive tasks. Various experimental and theoretical studies have investigated this rhythmic activity. The theoretical efforts have mainly been focused on the neuronal dynamics, under the assumption that network connectivity satisfies certain fine-tuning conditions required to generate gamma oscillations. However, it remains unclear how this fine tuning is achieved.Here we investigated the hypothesis that spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide the underlying mechanism for tuning synaptic connectivity to generate rhythmic activity in the gamma band. We addressed this question in a modeling study. We examined STDP dynamics in the framework of a network of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal populations that has been suggested to underlie the generation of gamma. Mean field Fokker Planck equations for the synaptic weights dynamics are derived in the limit of slow learning. We drew on this approximation to determine which types of STDP rules drive the system to exhibit gamma oscillations, and demonstrate how the parameters that characterize the plasticity rule govern the rhythmic activity. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism that can ensure the robustness of self-developing processes, in general and for rhythmogenesis in particular.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimrod Sherf ◽  
Maoz Shamir

Rhythmic activity has been associated with a wide range of cognitive processes including the encoding of sensory information, navigation, the transfer of emotional information and others. Previous studies have shown that spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) can facilitate the transfer of rhythmic activity downstream the information processing pathway. However, STDP has also been known to generate strong winner-take-all like competitions between subgroups of correlated synaptic inputs. Consequently, one might expect that STDP would induce strong competition between different rhythmicity channels thus preventing the multiplexing of information across different frequency channels. This study explored whether STDP facilitates the multiplexing of information across multiple frequency channels, and if so, under what conditions. We investigated the STDP dynamics in the framework of a model consisting of two competing sub-populations of neurons that synapse in a feedforward manner onto a single post-synaptic neuron. Each sub-population was assumed to oscillate in an independent manner and in a different frequency band. To investigate the STDP dynamics, a mean field Fokker-Planck theory was developed in the limit of the slow learning rate. Surprisingly, our theory predicted limited interactions between the different sub-groups. Our analysis further revealed that the interaction between these channels was mainly mediated by the shared component of the mean activity. Next, we generalized these results beyond the simplistic model using numerical simulations. We found that for a wide range of parameters, the system converged to a solution in which the post-synaptic neuron responded to both rhythms. Nevertheless, all the synaptic weights remained dynamic and did not converge to a fixed point. These findings imply that STDP can support the multiplexing of rhythmic information, and demonstrate how functionality (multiplexing of information) can be retained in the face of continuous remodeling of all the synaptic weights.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Tazerart ◽  
Diana E. Mitchell ◽  
Soledad Miranda-Rottmann ◽  
Roberto Araya

SUMMARYSpike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) has been extensively studied in cortical pyramidal neurons, however, the precise structural organization of excitatory inputs that supports STDP, as well as the structural, molecular and functional properties of dendritic spines during STDP remain unknown. Here we performed a spine STDP protocol using two-photon glutamate uncaging to mimic presynaptic glutamate release (pre) paired with somatically generated postsynaptic spikes (post). We found that the induction of STDP in single spines follows a classical Hebbian STDP rule, where pre-post pairings at timings that trigger LTP (t-LTP) produce shrinkage of the activated spine neck and a concomitant increase in its synaptic strength; and post-pre pairings that trigger LTD (t-LTD) decrease synaptic strength without affecting the activated spine shape. Furthermore, we tested whether the single spine-Hebbian STDP rule could be affected by the activation of neighboring (clustered) or distant (distributed) spines. Our results show that the induction of t-LTP in two clustered spines (<5 μm apart) enhances LTP through a mechanism dependent on local spine calcium accumulation and actin polymerization-dependent neck shrinkage, whereas t-LTD was disrupted by the activation of two clustered spines but recovered when spines were separated by >40 μm. These results indicate that synaptic cooperativity, induced by the co-activation of only two clustered spines, provides local dendritic depolarization and local calcium signals sufficient to disrupt t-LTD and extend the temporal window for the induction of t-LTP, leading to STDP only encompassing LTP.


2012 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksey V. Zaitsev ◽  
Roger Anwyl

The induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) of excitatory postsynaptic currents was investigated in proximal synapses of layer 2/3 pyramidal cells of the rat medial prefrontal cortex. The spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) induction protocol of negative timing, with postsynaptic leading presynaptic stimulation of action potentials (APs), induced LTD as expected from the classical STDP rule. However, the positive STDP protocol of presynaptic leading postsynaptic stimulation of APs predominantly induced a presynaptically expressed LTD rather than the expected postsynaptically expressed LTP. Thus the induction of plasticity in layer 2/3 pyramidal cells does not obey the classical STDP rule for positive timing. This unusual STDP switched to a classical timing rule if the slow Ca2+-dependent, K+-mediated afterhyperpolarization (sAHP) was inhibited by the selective blocker N-trityl-3-pyridinemethanamine (UCL2077), by the β-adrenergic receptor agonist isoproterenol, or by the cholinergic agonist carbachol. Thus we demonstrate that neuromodulators can affect synaptic plasticity by inhibition of the sAHP. These findings shed light on a fundamental question in the field of memory research regarding how environmental and behavioral stimuli influence LTP, thereby contributing to the modulation of memory.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanis Inglebert ◽  
Johnatan Aljadeff ◽  
Nicolas Brunel ◽  
Dominique Debanne

AbstractLike many forms of long-term synaptic plasticity, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) depends on intracellular Ca2+ signaling for its induction. Yet, all in vitro studies devoted to STDP used abnormally high external Ca2+ concentration. We measured STDP at the CA3-CA1 hippocampal synapses under different extracellular Ca2+ concentrations and found that the sign, shape and magnitude of plasticity strongly depend on Ca2+. A pre-post protocol that results in robust LTP in high Ca2+, yielded only LTD or no plasticity in the physiological Ca2+ range. LTP could be restored by either increasing the number of post-synaptic spikes or increasing the pairing frequency. A calcium-based plasticity model in which depression and potentiation depend on post-synaptic Ca2+ transients was found to fit quantitatively all the data, provided NMDA receptor-mediated non-linearities were implemented. In conclusion, STDP rule is profoundly altered in physiological Ca2+ but specific activity regimes restore a classical STDP profile.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sang-Yoon Kim ◽  
Woochang Lim

We consider a two-population network consisting of both inhibitory (I) interneurons and excitatory (E) pyramidal cells. This I-E neuronal network has adaptive dynamic I to E and E to I interpopulation synaptic strengths, governed by interpopulation spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). In previous works without STDPs, fast sparsely synchronized rhythms, related to diverse cognitive functions, were found to appear in a range of noise intensity D for static synaptic strengths. Here, by varying D, we investigate the effect of interpopulation STDPs on fast sparsely synchronized rhythms that emerge in both the I- and the E-populations. Depending on values of D, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) for population-averaged values of saturated interpopulation synaptic strengths are found to occur. Then, the degree of fast sparse synchronization varies due to effects of LTP and LTD. In a broad region of intermediate D, the degree of good synchronization (with higher synchronization degree) becomes decreased, while in a region of large D, the degree of bad synchronization (with lower synchronization degree) gets increased. Consequently, in each I- or E-population, the synchronization degree becomes nearly the same in a wide range of D (including both the intermediate and the large D regions). This kind of “equalization effect” is found to occur via cooperative interplay between the average occupation and pacing degrees of spikes (i.e., the average fraction of firing neurons and the average degree of phase coherence between spikes in each synchronized stripe of spikes in the raster plot of spikes) in fast sparsely synchronized rhythms. Finally, emergences of LTP and LTD of interpopulation synaptic strengths (leading to occurrence of equalization effect) are intensively investigated via a microscopic method based on the distributions of time delays between the pre- and the post-synaptic spike times.PACS numbers87.19.lw, 87.19.lm, 87.19.lc


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (03) ◽  
pp. 25-33
Author(s):  
Mario Antoine Aoun

We compare the number of states of a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) composed from chaotic spiking neurons versus the number of states of a SNN composed from regular spiking neurons while both SNNs implementing a Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) rule that we created. We find out that this STDP rule favors chaotic spiking since the number of states is larger in the chaotic SNN than the regular SNN. This chaotic favorability is not general; it is exclusive to this STDP rule only. This research falls under our long-term investigation of STDP and chaos theory.


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