Nicotine enhances attention and working memory by activating nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for these cognitive functions and is also rich in nAChR expression. Specific cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying nicotine's effects on cognition remain elusive. Here we show that nicotine exposure increases the threshold for synaptic spike-timi...

With STDP, a neuron embedded in a neuronal network can determine which neighboring neurons are worth listening to by potentiating those inputs that predict its own spiking activity. However, the neuron in question pays less attention to those neighboring neurons that fail to do this. In other words, the neuron pays less attention to neighbors speaking gibberish. The net result is that our sampl...

Spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) is a form of Hebbian learning which is thought to underlie structure formation during development, and learning and memory in later life. In this paper we show that the intrinsic properties of the postsynaptic neuron might have a deep influence on STDP dynamics by shaping the causal correlation between the pre- and the postsynaptic spike trains. The cell...

The level of synchronization in distributed systems is often controlled by the strength of the interactions between individual elements. In brain circuits the connection strengths between neurons are modified under the influence of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rules. Here we show that when recurrent networks with conduction delays exhibit population bursts, STDP rules exert a strong...

This study investigates the control of spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) by regulation of the dendritic spike threshold of the postsynaptic neuron. The control of synaptic plasticity may be implemented in the electrosensory system of mormyrid electric fish by feedback control. Dendritic spikes constitute the timing signal of the STDP learning rule that regulates the output of this initia...

As computers are getting more pervasive, software becomes transferable to different types of hardware and, at the extreme, being bio-compatible. Recent efforts in Artificial Intelligence propose that software can be trained and taught instead of “hard-coded” sequences. This paper addresses the learnability of software in the context of platforms integrating biological components. A method for t...

6 Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) is a Hebbian form of learning 7 that captures the temporal relationship between preand postsynaptic 8 spikes. Recent studies have uncovered that the relative concentration of 9 neuromodulators, in addition to the timing of preand postsynaptic spikes, 10 can affect the polarity of STDP. In this paper we sought to modify existing 11 STDP rule implementin...

Chronic social defeat stress (CSDS) is a clinically relevant model of mood disorders. The relationship between the CSDS model and a physiologically pertinent paradigm of synaptic plasticity is not known. Here, we found that cluster analysis of the emotional behavior states of mice exposed to CSDS allowed their segregation into anxious and non-anxious groups. Endocannabinoid-mediated spike-timin...