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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Inducing Long-Term Plasticity of Intrinsic Neuronal Excitability in Neurons of the Dorsal Lateral Geniculate Nucleus
Published on: September 20, 2024
Excitability changes that complement Hebbian learning
Maia K Janowitz1, Mark C W van Rossum
1Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, 5 Forrest Hill, EH1 2QL, Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract:
Experiments have shown that the intrinsic excitability of neurons is not constant, but varies with physiological stimulation and during various learning paradigms. We study a model of Hebbian synaptic plasticity which is supplemented with intrinsic excitability changes. The excitability changes transcend time delays and provide a memory trace. Periods of selective enhanced excitability can thus assist in forming associations between temporally separated events, such as occur in trace conditioning. We demonstrate that simple bidirectional networks with excitability changes can learn trace conditioning paradigms.
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