Related papers: Through synapses to spatial memory maps: a topolog…

Firing across populations of neurons in many regions of the mammalian brain maintains a temporal memory, a neural timeline of the recent past. Behavioral results demonstrate that people can both remember the past and anticipate the future…

A common view in the neuroscience community is that memory is encoded in the connection strength between neurons. This perception led artificial neural network models to focus on connection weights as the key variables to modulate learning.…

We consider a social learning problem, where a network of agents is interested in selecting one among a finite number of hypotheses. We focus on weakly-connected graphs where the network is partitioned into a sending part and a receiving…

Fascinating and puzzling phenomena, such as landmark vector cells, splitter cells, and event-specific representations to name a few, are regularly discovered in the hippocampus. Without a unifying principle that can explain these divergent…

We suggest a mechanism based on spike time dependent plasticity (STDP) of synapses to store, retrieve and predict temporal sequences. The mechanism is demonstrated in a model system of simplified integrate-and-fire type neurons densely…

When a neuron fires and the resulting action potential travels down its axon toward other neurons' dendrites, the effect on each of those neurons is mediated by the weight of the synapse that separates it from the firing neuron. This…

Spiking neural network is a type of artificial neural network in which neurons communicate between each other with spikes. Spikes are identical Boolean events characterized by the time of their arrival. A spiking neuron has internal…

Here we analyze synaptic transmission from an information-theoretic perspective. We derive closed-form expressions for the lower-bounds on the capacity of a simple model of a cortical synapse under two explicit coding paradigms. Under the…

Spiking activity of neurons engaged in learning and performing a task show complex spatiotemporal dynamics. While the output of recurrent network models can learn to perform various tasks, the possible range of recurrent dynamics that…

Short-term memory in the brain cannot in general be explained the way long-term memory can -- as a gradual modification of synaptic weights -- since it takes place too quickly. Theories based on some form of cellular bistability, however,…

Brain plasticity refers to brain's ability to change neuronal connections, as a result of environmental stimuli, new experiences, or damage. In this work, we study the effects of the synaptic delay on both the coupling strengths and…

Background: The roles of neuromodulation in a neural network, such as in a cortical microcolumn, are still incompletely understood. Neuromodulation influences neural processing by presynaptic and postsynaptic regulation of synaptic…

The brain is formed by cortical regions that are associated with different cognitive functions. Neurons within the same region are more likely to connect than neurons in distinct regions, making the brain network to have characteristics of…

The neural mechanisms supporting flexible relational inferences, especially in novel situations, are a major focus of current research. In the complementary learning systems framework, pattern separation in the hippocampus allows rapid…

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations, by applying learned rules to new content (systematicity) and thereby enabling an open-ended number of inferences and actions (generativity). Here, we propose that…

Embedding learning, a.k.a. representation learning, has been shown to be able to model large-scale semantic knowledge graphs. A key concept is a mapping of the knowledge graph to a tensor representation whose entries are predicted by models…

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as one of the algorithmic models in neuromorphic computing, have gained a great deal of research attention owing to temporal information processing capability, low power consumption, and high biological…

The integration and transmission of information in the brain are dependent on the interplay between structural and dynamical properties. Implicit in any pursuit aimed at understanding neural dynamics from appropriate sets of mathematically…

In this paper, we derive a new model of synaptic plasticity, based on recent algorithms for reinforcement learning (in which an agent attempts to learn appropriate actions to maximize its long-term average reward). We show that these direct…

Spike synchrony, which occurs in various cortical areas in response to specific perception, action and memory tasks, has sparked a long-standing debate on the nature of temporal organization in cortex. One prominent view is that this type…