Spike timing dependent plasticity and mutual information in spiking neurons

摘要

Synaptic plasticity that delicately depends on the relative timing of pre - and pos-synaptic spikes was recently observed in several brain areas. Here we derive a time-dependent learning rule from the basic principle of mutual information maximization for a leaky integrator neuron with spiking inputs, and study its relation to the experimentally observed rule. The comparison shows that not only is the biological learning rule similar in form to the analytically derived one, but it also increases mutual information to a near-optimal level. The analysis yields insights into the temporal characteristics of the observed learning rule and its dependency on neuronal biophysical parameters.