Temporally dependent plasticity: An information theoretic account

The paradigm of Hebbian learning has recently received a novel interpretation with the discovery of synaptic plasticity that depends on the relative timing of pre and post synaptic spikes. This paper derives a temporally dependent learning rule from the basic principle of mutual information maximization and studies its relation to the experimentally observed plasticity. We find that a supervised spike-dependent learning rule sharing similar structure with the experimentally observed plasticity increases mutual information to a stable near optimal level. Moreover, the analysis reveals how the temporal structure of time-dependent learning rules is determined by the temporal filter applied by neurons over their inputs. These results suggest experimental prediction as to the dependency of the learning rule on neuronal biophysical parameters.