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Eligibility Traces and Plasticity on Behavioral Time Scales: Experimental Support of NeoHebbian Three-Factor Learning Rules.

  • Gerstner W School of Computer Science and School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Lehmann M School of Computer Science and School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Liakoni V School of Computer Science and School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Corneil D School of Computer Science and School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Brea J School of Computer Science and School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
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  • 2018-08-16
Published in:
  • Frontiers in neural circuits. - 2018
behavioral learning
eligibility trace
hebb rule
neuromodulators
reinforcement learning
surprise
synaptic plasticity
synaptic tagging
Brain
Electrophysiological Phenomena
Humans
Learning
Models, Biological
Neuronal Plasticity
Neurons
English Most elementary behaviors such as moving the arm to grasp an object or walking into the next room to explore a museum evolve on the time scale of seconds; in contrast, neuronal action potentials occur on the time scale of a few milliseconds. Learning rules of the brain must therefore bridge the gap between these two different time scales. Modern theories of synaptic plasticity have postulated that the co-activation of pre- and postsynaptic neurons sets a flag at the synapse, called an eligibility trace, that leads to a weight change only if an additional factor is present while the flag is set. This third factor, signaling reward, punishment, surprise, or novelty, could be implemented by the phasic activity of neuromodulators or specific neuronal inputs signaling special events. While the theoretical framework has been developed over the last decades, experimental evidence in support of eligibility traces on the time scale of seconds has been collected only during the last few years. Here we review, in the context of three-factor rules of synaptic plasticity, four key experiments that support the role of synaptic eligibility traces in combination with a third factor as a biological implementation of neoHebbian three-factor learning rules.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/112113
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