Abstract
Recent studies have revealed novel effects [8,1,23,24,12,13] of patterns of neuronal activity and synaptic plasticity on the size and specificity of receptive fields. However, little has been done to quantify their effect on the receptive field shape. It has been shown that place fields are highly asymmetric such that, the firing rate of a place cell rises slowly as a rat enters a place field but the firing rate drops off abruptly at the end of the place field [15] in an experience dependent fashion. Here we present a computational model that can explain the results, based on NMDA-dependent LTP. Striking similarities between the hippocampal and striate receptive field dynamics are pointed out. Our model suggests that LTP/D could result in diverse phenomena such as phase precession in the hippocampal neurons and the origin of directional receptive fields in the striate cortex. It is suggested that the key feature underlying directionality and inseparable spatiotemporal dynamics is the asymmetric shape of the receptive field.
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