@article {Fiebig334821, author = {Florian Fiebig and Pawel Herman and Anders Lansner}, title = {Fast Hebbian Plasticity explains Working Memory and Neural Binding}, elocation-id = {334821}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.1101/334821}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {We have extended a previous spiking neural network model of prefrontal cortex with fast Hebbian plasticity to include also interactions between short-term and long-term cortical memory stores. We investigated how prefrontal cortex could bind, maintain and update multi-modal long-term memory representations by simulating three cortical patches in macaque brain, corresponding to networks in prefrontal cortex together with visual and auditory temporal cortical areas.Our simulation results demonstrate how simultaneous, brief multi-modal memory cues could build a temporary joint memory representation linked via prefrontal cortex. The latter can then activate spontaneously and thereby reactivate the associated long-term representations. Cueing one long-term memory item rapidly pattern-completes the associated un-cued item via prefrontal cortex. The short-term memory network flexibly updates as new stimuli arrive thereby gradually over-writing older representations. In a wider context, this working memory model suggests a novel explanation for the {\textquoteleft}neural binding problem{\textquoteright}, a long-standing and fundamental issue in cognitive neuroscience.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/25/334821}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/25/334821.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }