Bull. Amer. Phys. Soc. 45:943, 2000.

Formation of temporal-feature maps in the barn owl's auditory system

Richard Kempter

Computational maps are of central importance to the brain's representation of the outside world. The question of how maps are formed during ontogenetic development is a subject of intense research (Hubel & Wiesel, Proc R Soc B 198:1, 1977; Buonomano & Merzenich, Annu Rev Neurosci 21:149, 1998). The development in the primary visual cortex is in principle well explained compared to that in the auditory system, partly because the mechanisms underlying the formation of temporal-feature maps are hardly understood (Carr, Annu Rev Neurosci 16:223, 1993). Through a modelling study based on computer simulations in a system of spiking neurons a solution is offered to the problem of how a map of interaural time differences is set up in the nucleus laminaris of the barn owl, as a typical example. An array of neurons is able to represent interaural time differences in an orderly manner, viz., a map, if homosynaptic spike-based Hebbian learning (Gerstner et al, Nature 383:76, 1996; Kempter et al, Phys Rev E 59:4498, 1999) is combined with a presynaptic propagation of synaptic modifications (Fitzsimonds & Poo, Physiol Rev 78:143, 1998). The latter may be orders of magnitude weaker than the former. The algorithm is a key mechanism to the formation of temporal-feature maps on a submillisecond time scale.


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