Distributed synchrony in an attractor of spiking neurons

Recently, it has been shown that there exists a temporal synaptic learning curve, composed of potentiation;for short time delays between pre- and post -synaptic neuronal spiking, and depression for spiking events occurring in the opposite order. We investigate the effect that such a curve can have on the temporal realization of an attractor in an associative memory network of spiking neurons. We find that an interesting result of this learning par adigm is the formation of distributed synchrony, i.e. spontaneous division of the Hebbian cell assembly into groups of cells that fire in a cyclic man ner. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.