Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3 (NIPS 1990)
Thomas Brown, Zachary Mainen, Anthony Zador, Brenda Claiborne
We are exploring the significance of biological complexity for neuronal computation. Here we demonstrate that Hebbian synapses in realistical(cid:173) ly-modeled hippocampal pyramidal cells may give rise to two novel forms of self -organization in response to structured synaptic input. First, on the basis of the electrotonic relationships between synaptic contacts, a cell may become tuned to a small subset of its input space. Second, the same mechanisms may produce clusters of potentiated synapses across the space of the dendrites. The latter type of self-organization may be functionally significant in the presence of nonlinear dendritic conduc(cid:173) tances.