Abstract
Many behavioural tasks require an animal to integrate information on a slow timescale that can exceed hundreds of milliseconds. How this is realized by neurons with membrane time constants on the order of tens of milliseconds or less remains an open question. We show, how the interaction of two kinds of events within the dendritic tree, excitatory postsynaptic potentials and locally generated dendritic plateau potentials, can allow a single neuron to detect specific sequences of spiking input on such slow timescales. Our conceptual model reveals, how the morphology of a neuron’s dendritic tree determines its computational function, which can range from a simple logic gate to the gradual integration of evidence to the detection of complex spatio-temporal spike-sequences on long time-scales. As an example, we illustrate in a simulated navigation task how this mechanism can even allow individual neurons to reliably detect specific movement trajectories with high tolerance for timing variability. We relate our results to conclusive findings in neurobiology and discuss implications for both experimental and theoretical neuroscience.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
jleugeri{at}uni-osnabrueck.de, pnieters{at}uni-osnabrueck.de, gpipa{at}uni-osnabrueck.de
Major revision.
2 Unlike EPSPs, this attenuation cannot be circumvented by synaptic scaling as for dendritic democracy.
3 As the last equation shows, referring to this operation as an “or” is justified in the sense that the resulting rate is proportional to the addition of the segments’ individual plateau-firing-rates minus the “and” operation applied to both, which generalizes the Boolean operation to real values.
