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A developmental learning rule for coincidence tuning in the barn owl auditory system
W. Gerstner, R. Kempter, and J. L. van Hemmen
Binaural coincidence detection is essential for the localization of external sounds and requires auditory signal processing with high temporal precision. We present an integrate-and-fire model of spike processing in the third order nucleus laminaris of the auditory pathway of the barn owl. Each input spike generates an excitatory postsynaptic potential with a width of 250 microseconds. Output spikes occur with a temporal precision of 25 microseconds, that is one order of magnitude better. This is possible since neuronal connections are fine tuned during a critical period of the development as has been suggested by recent experiments. Unsupervised learning naturally leads to a tuning to interaural time differences.
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