Shaping synaptic learning by the duration of the postsynaptic action potential

Abstract

Most previous studies treated spikes as all-or-none events, and considered their duration and magnitude as negligible. Action potential (AP) duration varies across neuron types, but its consequences on synaptic plasticity remain largely unexplored. Here we study the effects of AP-duration on spike-timing dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP) by negatively shifting the temporal window, potentiating synapses with presy-naptic EPSPs occurring both before and during a postsynaptic AP. With this interpretation, we demonstrate that AP-duration controls the shape of weight distribution and the temporal fluctuations of the weights after the distribution reaches a steady-state.