Stability against fluctuations: a two-dimensional study of scaling, bifurcations and spontaneous symmetry breaking in stochastic models of synaptic plasticity
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Stochastic models of synaptic plasticity must confront the corrosive influence of fluctuations in synaptic strength on patterns of synaptic connectivity. To solve this problem, we have proposed that synapses act as filters, integrating plasticity induction signals and expressing changes in synaptic strength only upon reaching filter threshold. Our earlier analytical study calculated the lifetimes of quasi-stable patterns of synaptic connectivity with synaptic filtering. We showed that the plasticity step size in a stochastic model of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) acts as a temperature-like parameter, exhibiting a critical value below which neuronal structure formation occurs. The filter threshold scales this temperature-like parameter downwards, cooling the dynamics and enhancing stability. A key step in this calculation was a resetting approximation, essentially reducing the dynamics to one-dimensional processes. Here, we revisit our earlier study to examine this resetting approximation, with the aim of understanding in detail why it works so well by comparing it, and a simpler approximation, to the system’s full dynamics consisting of various embedded two-dimensional processes without resetting. Comparing the full system to the simpler approximation, to our original resetting approximation, and to a one-afferent system, we show that their equilibrium distributions of synaptic strengths and critical plasticity step sizes are all qualitatively similar, and increasingly quantitatively similar as the filter threshold increases. This increasing similarity is due to the decorrelation in changes in synaptic strength between different afferents caused by our STDP model, and the amplification of this decorrelation with larger synaptic filters.
期刊介绍:
Biological Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary medium for theoretical and application-oriented aspects of information processing in organisms, including sensory, motor, cognitive, and ecological phenomena. Topics covered include: mathematical modeling of biological systems; computational, theoretical or engineering studies with relevance for understanding biological information processing; and artificial implementation of biological information processing and self-organizing principles. Under the main aspects of performance and function of systems, emphasis is laid on communication between life sciences and technical/theoretical disciplines.