Synapses with short-term plasticity are optimal estimators of presynaptic membrane potentials

Jean Pascal Pfister, Peter Dayan, Mát́ Lengyel

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

The trajectory of the somatic membrane potential of a cortical neuron exactly reflects the computations performed on its afferent inputs. However, the spikes of such a neuron are a very low-dimensional and discrete projection of this continually evolving signal. We explored the possibility that the neuronĝ€2s efferent synapses perform the critical computational step of estimating the membrane potential trajectory from the spikes. We found that short-term changes in synaptic efficacy can be interpreted as implementing an optimal estimator of this trajectory. Short-term depression arose when presynaptic spiking was sufficiently intense as to reduce the uncertainty associated with the estimate; short-term facilitation reflected structural features of the statistics of the presynaptic neuron such as up and down states. Our analysis provides a unifying account of a powerful, but puzzling, form of plasticity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1271-1275
Number of pages5
JournalNature Neuroscience
Volume13
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2010
Externally publishedYes

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