Long-term depression and recognition of parallel fibre patterns in a multi-compartmental model of a cerebellar Purkinje cell

It has been suggested that long-term depression (LTD) of parallel fibre (PF) synapses enables a cerebellar Purkinje cell (PC) to learn to recognise PF activity patterns. We investigate the recognition of PF patterns that have been stored by LTD of AMPA receptors in a multi-compartmental PC model with a passive soma. We iind that a corresponding artificial neural network outperforms a PC model with active dendrites by an order of magnitude. Removal of the dendritic ion channels leads to a further decrease in performance. Another effect of the active dendrites is an afterhyperpolarization response to novel PF patterns. Thus, the LTD based storage of PF patterns can lead to a potentiated late PC response. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.