Drifting assemblies for persistent memory: Neuron transitions and unsupervised compensation.

ABSTRACT: Change is ubiquitous in living beings. In particular, the connectome and neural representations can change. Nevertheless, behaviors and memories often persist over long times. In a standard model, associative memories are represented by assemblies of strongly interconnected neurons. For faithful storage these assemblies are assumed to consist of the same neurons over time. Here we propose a contrasting memory model with complete temporal remodeling of assemblies, based on experimentally observed changes of synapses and neural representations. The assemblies drift freely as noisy autonomous network activity and spontaneous synaptic turnover induce neuron exchange. The gradual exchange allows activity-dependent and homeostatic plasticity to conserve the representational structure and keep in

SUBMITTER: Kossio YFK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8727022 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature