Abstract

Sensory experience is essential for the refinement of neuronal circuits during development and for learning and memory in the adult brain. Such experience-dependent plasticity is largely mediated by activitydependent synaptic modification. In this review, we focus on a spike timing–dependent synaptic learning rule, in which the direction and magnitude of synaptic modification depend on the relative spike timing of presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons. We discuss a series of recent studies exploring the functional implications of this learning rule in the visual system. These studies show that temporally patterned visual stimuli can cause rapid changes in visual circuits, neuronal receptive fields, and visual perception, with a temporal specificity of tens of milliseconds. Particularly, motion stimuli that are common in natural scenes may interact strongly with the spike timing–dependent learning rule, leaving distinct marks in the perceptual function of the mature brain.

Citations