Phys. Rev. Lett. 87(24), 248101 (10 December 2001). Published online Nov 27.

Temporal map formation in the barn owl's brain.

C. Leibold, R. Kempter, and J. L. van Hemmen

Barn owls provide an experimentally well-specified example of a temporal map, a neuronal representation of the outside world in the brain by means of time. Their laminar nucleus exhibits a place code of interaural time differences, a cue which is used to determine the azimuthal location of a sound stimulus, e.g., prey. We analyze a model of synaptic plasticity that explains the formation of such a representation in the young bird and show how in a large parameter regime a combination of local and non-local synaptic plasticity yields the temporal map as found experimentally. Our analysis includes the effect of nonlinearities as well as the influence of neuronal noise.