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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Dendritic structure enables powerful plasticity

Federico Benitez¹, Ben von Hünerbein¹, Kevin Max¹, Arno Granier¹, Julian Göltz¹, Simon Brandt¹, Timo Gierlich², Katharina A. Wilmes¹, Paul Haider¹, Jakob Jordan³, Jean-Pascal Pfister⁴, Walter Senn¹, Mihai A. Petrovici¹; ¹University of Bern, ²Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, ³Yale University, ⁴Department of Physiology, ünivelsitat Bern

Presenter: Federico Benitez

Over the past decades, it has become increasingly clear that the complex morphology of cortical neurons might be more than just a quirk of evolution, and that dendritic compartments must contribute --- possibly in many ways --- to brain function. While most computational studies focus on the enhanced representational capabilities of multicompartment models when compared to point neurons, we focus here on the implications of neuronal morphology for synaptic plasticity. We argue that the ability of single neurons to simultaneously encode multiple pieces of information gives synapses local access to more than just the classical Hebbian pre- and postsynaptic terms. With just a single additional compartment, neurons can provide synapses with the means of calculating errors, which gives rise to powerful real-time and fully local instantiations of learning by gradient descent. Implemented within cortical microcircuits capable of propagating and manipulating these errors, compartmentalized neurons thus enable the learning of complex tasks, which appears otherwise unachievable by Hebbian plasticity alone.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding