Dresden 2009 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Neuronal and Sensory Systems

BP 14.11: Talk

Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 17:00–17:15, HÜL 186

Information Filtering by Synaptic Short-Term Plasticity — •Matthias Merkel and Benjamin Lindner — Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany

Short-term plasticity (STP) changes the transmission properties of synapses on the scale of 100ms. It is commonly thought to act as a filter for information passing through the synapse. There are two competing effects: synaptic facilitation and depression. They either increase or decrease the postsynaptic amplitude of a presynaptic spike depending on the spike history. We study this filtering process for rate-modulated Poissonian input spike trains and a population of independent synapses. We derive expressions for information-theoretical measures like the spectral coherence in the limit case of pure facilitation and discuss by means of our analytical results conditions for a broadband transmission of information (frequency-independence of the coherence function) which previously has been found numerically [1]. [1] B. Lindner, D. Gangloff, A. Longtin, and J. E. Lewis "Broadband coding with dynamic synapses", (submitted, 2008)