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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Spike Synchrony Resolves Stimulus Saliency and Familiarity

Viktoria Zemliak¹, Pascal Nieters¹; ¹University of Osnabrück

Presenter: Viktoria Zemliak

The function of temporal coding in the brain remains controversial, with debate centering on the following question: does spike timing information, such as their temporal synchrony, play a meaningful role in neural computation which cannot be attributed to firing rate? We propose the solution to this dilemma: spike synchrony provides crucial information about stimulus familiarity under conditions when the firing rate alone is insufficient − namely, when the input stimulus is varied in saliency. Using simulations of recurrent spiking networks, we show that synchrony is particularly effective in distinguishing familiar stimuli of low saliency from novel stimuli of high saliency − an important distinction for both biological perception and artificial agents navigating dynamic environments. Synchrony is more sensitive to recurrent connectivity, that encodes prior experiences, compared to input firing rate. This highlights the relevance of synchrony for familiarity encoding in a scenario of realistic input variability.

Topic Area: Brain Networks & Neural Dynamics

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