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bioRxiv · 10.1101/707398

Short-term synaptic plasticity makes neurons sensitive to the distribution of presynaptic population firing rates

Tauffer, L.·Kumar, A.
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Abstract

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWThe ability to discriminate spikes that encode a particular stimulus from spikes produced by background activity is essential for reliable information processing in the brain. We describe how synaptic short-term plasticity (STP) modulates the output of presynaptic populations as a function of the distribution of the spiking activity and find a strong relationship between STP features and sparseness of the population code, which could solve the discrimination problem. Furthermore, we show that feedforward excitation followed by inhibition (FF-EI), combined with target-dependent STP, promote substantial increase in the signal gain even for considerable deviations from the optimal conditions, granting robustness to this mechanism. A simulated neuron driven by a spiking FF-EI network is reliably modulated as predicted by a rate analysis and inherits the ability to differentiate sparse signals from dense background activity changes of the same magnitude, even at very low signal-to-noise conditions. We propose that the STP-based distribution discrimination is likely a latent function in several regions such as the cerebellum and the hippocampus.

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Tauffer, L., Kumar, A.. 2019-07-18. Short-term synaptic plasticity makes neurons sensitive to the distribution of presynaptic population firing rates. https://doi.org/10.1101/707398

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