Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity and Short-Term Plasticity Jointly Control the Excitation of Hebbian Plasticity without Weight Constraints in Neural Networks

Hebbian plasticity precisely describes how synapses increase their synaptic strengths according to the correlated activities between two neurons; however, it fails to explain how these activities dilute the strength of the same synapses. Recent literature has proposed spike-timing-dependent plasticity and short-term plasticity on multiple dynamic stochastic synapses that can control synaptic excitation and remove many user-defined constraints. Under this hypothesis, a network model was implemented giving more computational power to receptors, and the behavior at a synapse was defined by the collective dynamic activities of stochastic receptors. An experiment was conducted to analyze can spike-timing-dependent plasticity interplay with short-term plasticity to balance the excitation of the Hebbian neurons without weight constraints? If so what underline mechanisms help neurons to maintain such excitation in computational environment? According to our results both plasticity mechanisms work together to balance the excitation of the neural network as our neurons stabilized its weights for Poisson inputs with mean firing rates from 10 Hz to 40 Hz. The behavior generated by the two neurons was similar to the behavior discussed under synaptic redistribution, so that synaptic weights were stabilized while there was a continuous increase of presynaptic probability of release and higher turnover rate of postsynaptic receptors.