Paper on computational abstraction of long-term potentiation

[Lokendra Shastri]

Dear Connectionists,

The following article may be of interest to you:

"A Computationally Efficient Abstraction of Long-term Potentiation"
Neurocomputing (In Press).

The final draft is available at:

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri/psfiles/ShastriNCltp02.pdf

Best wishes,

-- Lokendra Shastri

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri
Phone:	(510) 666-2910     FAX:	(510) 666-2956
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A Computationally Efficient Abstraction of Long-term Potentiation

Lokendra Shastri
ICSI, Berkeley, CA.

Key words: Long-term potentiation; hippocampus; binding detection;
dentate gyrus; episodic memory

Abstract

A computational abstraction of long-term potentiation (LTP) is proposed.
The abstraction captures key temporal and cooperative properties of LTP,
and also lends itself to rapid computation. The abstraction is used to
simulate the recruitment of binding-detector cells in the dentate gyrus
(DG). The simulation results are used to validate a quantitative analysis
of binding-detector cell recruitment in DG. The analysis shows that (i)
a large number of binding-detector cells would be recruited in response 
to entorhinal cortex activity and (ii) cells recruited for distinct bindings
would exhibit very low cross-talk. These results help in understanding
the neural basis of episodic memory.