The effect of different types of synaptic plasticity on the performance of associative memory networks with excitatory and inhibitory sub-populations

Abstract

In real neuronal networks it is known that neurons are either excitatory or inhibitory. However, it is not known whether all synapses within the subpopulations are plastic. It is interesting to investigate the implications these constraints may have on functionality. Here we investigate highly simplified models of associative memory with a variety of allowed synaptic plasticity regimes. We show that the allowed synaptic plasticity does indeed have a large effect on the performance of the network and that some regimes are much better than others.