Persistent Activity in Neural Networks with Dynamic Synapses

By Omri Barak, Misha Tsodyks. 2007

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Persistent activity states (attractors), observed in several neocortical areas after the removal of a sensory stimulus, are believed to be the neuronal basis of working memory. One of the possible mechanisms that can underlie persistent activity is recurrent excitation mediated by intracortical synaptic connections. A recent experimental study revealed that connections between pyramidal cells in prefrontal cortex exhibit various degrees of synaptic depression and facilitation. Here we analyze the effect of synaptic dynamics on the emergence and persistence of attractor states in interconnected neural networks. We show that different combinations of synaptic depression and facilitation result in qualitatively different network dynamics with respect to the emergence of the attractor states. This analysis raises the possibility that the framework of attractor neural networks can be extended to represent time-dependent stimuli.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Using Fast Weights to Attend to the Recent Past (2016, background): “…to maintain temporary state in activation dynamics, that focus may be inconsistent with evidence that the brain also—or perhaps primarily—maintains temporary state information by short-term synaptic plasticity mechanisms [Tsodyks et al., 1998, Abbott and Regehr, 2004, Barak and Tsodyks, 2007].”