Activity-Dependent Development of Axonal and Dendritic Delays, or, Why Synaptic Transmission Should Be Unreliable

Senn, Walter; Schneider, Martin; Ruf, Berthold (2002). Activity-Dependent Development of Axonal and Dendritic Delays, or, Why Synaptic Transmission Should Be Unreliable. Neural computation, 14(3), pp. 583-619. MIT Press 10.1162/089976602317250915

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Systematic temporal relations between single neuronal activities or population activities are ubiquitous in the brain. No experimental evidence, however, exists for a direct modification of neuronal delays during Hebbian-type stimulation protocols. We show that in fact an explicit delay adaptation is not needed if one assumes that the synaptic strengths are modified according to the recently observed temporally asymmetric learning rule with the downregulating branch dominating the upregulating branch. During development, slow, unbiased fluctuations in the transmission time, together with temporally correlated network activity, may control neural growth and implicitly induce drifts in the axonal delays and dendritic latencies. These delays and latencies become optimally tuned in the sense that the synaptic response tends to peak in the soma of the postsynaptic cell if this is most likely to fire. The nature of the selection process requires unreliable synapses in order to give successful synapses an evolutionary advantage over the others. The width of the learning function also determines the preferred dendritic delay and the preferred width of the postsynaptic response. Hence, it may implicitly determine whether a synaptic connection provides a precisely timed or a broadly tuned “contextual” signal.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	04 Faculty of Medicine > Pre-clinic Human Medicine > Institute of Physiology
UniBE Contributor:	Senn, Walter
Subjects:	600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health
ISSN:	0899-7667
Publisher:	MIT Press
Language:	English
Submitter:	Virginie Sabado
Date Deposited:	18 Jan 2023 15:52
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 23:28
Publisher DOI:	10.1162/089976602317250915
PubMed ID:	11860684
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/177227