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Synaptic balancing guided by spike-timing-dependent plasticity in olfactory cortex model

Mykola Lysetskiy and Jacek M. Zurada

University of Louisville

Synaptic balancing, based on the spike-timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP), has been recently shown to be able to drive a neuron from integrator to coincident-time detector mode of operation, maximizing the neuron's information transmission. The circuits of pyramidal cells of piriform cortex are an example of a neural system that may need such balancing, as these neurons are known to be sensitive to the relative timing of the afferent and association input signals. Not only piriform cortex is likely to be in need of such STDP-based balancing, it also is, in a sense, an ideal "hardware" for its implementation. Highly structured spatio-temporal dynamics of the postsynaptic potentials at the dendrites of pyramidal cells could be easily used in spike-time-dependent learning. We develop a model of piriform cortex, which employs recently proposed principle of synaptic balancing, based on the STDP learning rule with a larger window of synaptic weakening. We argue that this phenomenon could take place in this part of olfactory cortex and play a crucial role in learning spatio-temporal sequences of the postsynaptic potentials at the dendrites of the pyramidal cells.