During neural development sensory stimulation induces long-term changes in the receptive field of the neurons that encode the stimuli. The Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro (BCM) model was introduced to model and analyze this process computationally, and it remains one of the major models of unsupervised plasticity to this day. Here we show that for some stimulus types, the convergence of the synaptic weights under the BCM rule slows down exponentially as the number of synapses per neuron increases. We present a mathematical analysis of the slowdown that shows also how the slowdown can be avoided.
Models of synaptic plasticity have been used to better understand neural development as well as learning and memory. One prominent classic model is the Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro (BCM) model that has been particularly successful in explaining plasticity of the visual cortex. Here, in an effort to include more biophysical detail in the BCM model, we incorporate 1) feedforward inhibition, and 2) the experimental observation that large synapses are relatively harder to potentiate than weak ones, while synaptic depression is proportional to the synaptic strength. These modifications change the outcome of unsupervised plasticity under the BCM model. The amount of feed-forward inhibition adds a parameter to BCM that turns out to determine the strength of competition. In the limit of strong inhibition the learning outcome is identical to standard BCM and the neuron becomes selective to one stimulus only (winner-take-all). For smaller values of inhibition, competition is weaker and the receptive fields are less selective. However, both BCM variants can yield realistic receptive fields.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.