Section: Research Program

Synaptic Plasticity

Neural networks show amazing abilities to evolve and adapt, and to store and process information. These capabilities are mainly conditioned by plasticity mechanisms, and especially synaptic plasticity, inducing a mutual coupling between network structure and neuron dynamics. Synaptic plasticity occurs at many levels of organization and time scales in the nervous system [49]. It is of course involved in memory and learning mechanisms, but it also alters excitability of brain areas and regulates behavioral states (e.g., transition between sleep and wakeful activity). Therefore, understanding the effects of synaptic plasticity on neurons dynamics is a crucial challenge.

Our group is developing mathematical and numerical methods to analyse this mutual interaction. On the one hand, we have shown that plasticity mechanisms [8], [13], Hebbian-like or STDP, have strong effects on neuron dynamics complexity, such as synaptic and propagation delays [16], dynamics complexity reduction, and spike statistics.