Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

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

Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity, replay, and emergent behavioral choice

Suhee Cho¹, James Lloyd McClelland²; ¹Stanford University, ²DeepMind, London, UK

Presenter: Suhee Cho

Animals can adapt to novel environments with minimal exploration and rapidly adjust to change. While the hippocampus is thought to encode spatial and other behaviorally relevant information to support this, how it does so with such efficiency remains unclear. Here, we show that behavioral time-scale synaptic plasticity (BTSP) coupled with replay can allow the hippocampus to learn a predictive map—known as the successor representation (SR)—after minimal exploration. Reward-induced BTSP events bias this map to over-represent reward locations, biasing behavior based on this representation toward reward, and replay events extend this bias to locations farther from the reward. Notably, the representation dynamically adjusts when reward locations shift, supporting rapid behavioral adaptation. Together, our findings offer a biologically plausible account of how BTSP and replay jointly enable quick adaptation of the SR, supporting efficient and adaptive learning.

Topic Area: Memory, Spatial Cognition & Skill Learning

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF