Spike-Timing Dependence of Structural Plasticity Explains Cooperative Synapse Formation in the Neocortex

By Moritz Deger, Moritz Helias, Stefan Rotter, Markus Diesmann. 2012

45 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Structural plasticity governs the long-term development of synaptic connections in the neocortex. While the underlying processes at the synapses are not fully understood, there is strong evidence that a process of random, independent formation and pruning of excitatory synapses can be ruled out. Instead, there must be some cooperation between the synaptic contacts connecting a single pre- and postsynaptic neuron pair. So far, the mechanism of cooperation is not known. Here we demonstrate that local correlation detection at the postsynaptic dendritic spine suffices to explain the synaptic cooperation effect, without assuming any hypothetical direct interaction pathway between the synaptic contacts. Candidate biomolecular mechanisms for dendritic correlation detection have been identified previously, as well as for structural plasticity based thereon. By analyzing and fitting of a simple model, we show that spike-timing correlation dependent structural plasticity, without additional mechanisms of cross-synapse interaction, can reproduce the experimentally observed distributions of numbers of synaptic contacts between pairs of neurons in the neocortex. Furthermore, the model yields a first explanation for the existence of both transient and persistent dendritic spines and allows to make predictions for future experiments.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Structural Synaptic Plasticity Has High Memory Capacity and Can Explain Graded Amnesia, Catastrophic Forgetting, and the Spacing Effect (2014, background): “Third, anatomical experiments have shown that the number of real synapses per connected neuron pair is relatively constant in cortical areas [59] which indicates active regulation, for example, based on spike correlations [132,133].”
NISPA: Neuro-Inspired Stability-Plasticity Adaptation for Continual Learning in Sparse Networks (2022, background): “While the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood yet, recent studies have shown that synapse rewiring occurs rapidly during learning (Fu & Zuo, 2011; Kasai et al., 2010; Deger et al., 2012).”
A Simple Rule for Dendritic Spine and Axonal Bouton Formation Can Account for Cortical Reorganization after Focal Retinal Lesions (2013, background): “Alterations in dendritic membrane potential can induce very localized structural changes that seem to follow Hebbian synaptic plasticity rules [31].”
Eligibility Traces and Plasticity on Behavioral Time Scales: Experimental Support of NeoHebbian Three-Factor Learning Rules (2018, background): “g et al., 2000; van Rossum et al., 2000; Rubin et al., 2001) are further examples of the general theoretical framework of Eq. (1) and so are some models of structural plasticity (Helias et al., 2008; Deger et al., 2012; Fauth et al., 2015). Hebbian models of synaptic consolidation 4 A B d (i) (ii) (”