The self-organized learning of noisy environmental stimuli requires distinct phases of plasticity.

ABSTRACT: Along sensory pathways, representations of environmental stimuli become increasingly sparse and expanded. If additionally the feed-forward synaptic weights are structured according to the inherent organization of stimuli, the increase in sparseness and expansion leads to a reduction of sensory noise. However, it is unknown how the synapses in the brain form the required structure, especially given the omnipresent noise of environmental stimuli. Here, we employ a combination of synaptic plasticity and intrinsic plasticity-adapting the excitability of each neuron individually-and present stimuli with an inherent organization to a feed-forward network. We observe that intrinsic plasticity maintains the sparseness of the neural code and thereby allows synaptic plasticity to learn the organizat

SUBMITTER: Kruppel S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7055647 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature