A unified model of short- and long-term plasticity: Effects on network connectivity and information capacity

Activity-dependent synaptic plasticity is a fundamental learning mechanism that shapes the connectivity and activity of neural circuits. Existing computational models of Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) capture long-term synaptic changes with varying degrees of biological detail. A common approach is to neglect the influence of short-term dynamics on long-term plasticity, which may be an oversimplification for certain neuron types. Thus, there is a need for new models to investigate how short-term dynamics influence long-term plasticity. To address this gap, we introduce a novel phenomenological model, the Short-Long-Term STDP (SL-STDP) rule, which directly integrates the Tsodyks-Markram model of short-term dynamics with postsynaptic long-term plasticity. We fit the new model to recordings from layer 5 of the visual cortex and study how short-term plasticity affects the firing rate frequency dependence of long-term plasticity in a single synapse. Our analysis revealed that the pre- and postsynaptic frequency dependence of long-term plasticity plays a crucial role in shaping the self-organization of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their information processing through the emergence of sink and source nodes. We applied the SL-STDP rule to RNNs and found that neurons in the SL-STDP network self-organize into distinct firing rate clusters, stabilizing the dynamics. We extended the experiments by including homeostatic balancing, namely weight normalization and excitatory-to-inhibitory plasticity, and observed differences in degree correlations between the SL-STDP network and a network without direct coupling between short-term and long-term plasticity. Finally, we evaluated how the modified connectivity affects the networks' information capacity in reservoir computing tasks. The SL-STDP rule outperformed the uncoupled system in the majority of tasks, and including excitatory-to-inhibitory facilitating synapses further improved information capacity. Our study demonstrates that short-term dynamics-induced changes in the frequency dependence of long-term plasticity play a pivotal role in shaping network dynamics and link synaptic mechanisms to information processing in RNNs.