Electrophysiological connectivity patterns in cortex often show a few strong connections, sometimes bidirectional, in a sea of weak connections. In order to explain these connectivity patterns, we use a model of Spike--Timing--Dependent Plasticity where synaptic changes depend on presynaptic spike arrival and the postsynaptic membrane potential, filtered with two different time constants. The model describes several nonlinear effects in STDP experiments, as well as the voltage dependence of plasticity. We show that in a simulated recurrent network of spiking neurons our plasticity rule leads not only to development of localized receptive fields, but also to connectivity patterns that reflect the neural code: for temporal coding paradigms with spatio--temporal input correlations, strong connections are predominantly unidirectional, whereas they are bidirectional under rate coded input with spatial correlations only. Thus variable connectivity patterns in the brain could reflect different coding principles across brain areas; moreover simulations suggest that plasticity is surprisingly fast.

Changes in synaptic efficacies need to be long-lasting in order to serve as a substrate for memory. Experimentally, synaptic plasticity exhibits phases covering the induction of long-term potentiation and depression (LTP/LTD) during the early phase of synaptic plasticity, the setting of synaptic tags, a trigger process for protein synthesis, and a slow transition leading to synaptic consolidation during the late phase of synaptic plasticity. We present a mathematical model that describes these different phases of synaptic plasticity. The model explains a large body of experimental data on synaptic tagging and capture, cross-tagging, and the late phases of LTP and LTD. Moreover, the model accounts for the dependence of LTP and LTD induction on voltage and presynaptic stimulation frequency. The stabilization of potentiated synapses during the transition from early to late LTP occurs by protein synthesis dynamics that are shared by groups of synapses. The functional consequence of this shared process is that previously stabilized patterns of strong or weak synapses onto the same postsynaptic neuron are well protected against later changes induced by LTP/LTD protocols at individual synapses.