Abstract
A cortical neuron typically makes multiple synaptic contacts on the dendrites of a post-synaptic target neuron. The functional implications of this apparent redundancy are unclear. The dendritic location of a synaptic contact affects the time-course of the somatic post-synaptic potential (PSP) due to dendritic cable filtering. Consequently, a single pre-synaptic axonal spike results with a PSP composed of multiple temporal profiles. Here, we developed a “filter-and-fire” (F&F) neuron model that captures these features and show that the memory capacity of this neuron is threefold larger than that of a leaky integrate-and-fire (I&F) neuron, when trained to emit precisely timed output spikes for specific input patterns. Furthermore, the F&F neuron can learn to recognize spatio-temporal input patterns, e.g., MNIST digits, where the I&F model completely fails. Multiple synaptic contacts between pairs of cortical neurons are therefore an important feature rather than a bug and can serve to reduce axonal wiring requirements.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Updated Author List on bioRxiv (in the manuscript itself everything was OK in the first place)
