Coherence detection in a spiking neuron via Hebbian learning

Abstract

It is generally assumed that neurons communicate through temporal firing patterns. As a first step, we will study the learning of a layer of realistic neurons in the particular case where the relevant messages are formed by temporally correlated patterns, or synfire patterns. The model is a layer of integrate-and-fire neurons with synaptic current dynamics that adapts by minimizing a cost according to a gradient descent scheme. The cost we define leads to a rule similar to spike-time dependent Hebbian plasticity. Moreover, our results show that the rule that we derive is biologically plausible and leads to the detection of the coherence in the input in an unsupervised way. An application to shape recognition is shown as an illustration.