On the Relevance of the Shape of Postsynaptic Potentials for the Computational Power of Networks of Spiking Neurons

W. Maass and B. Ruf

Abstract:

The firing of a neuron in a biological neural system causes in certain other neurons excitatory postsynaptic potential changes (EPSP's) that are not "rectangular", but have the form of a smooth hill. We prove in this article for a formal model of a network of spiking neurons, that the rising respectively declining segments of these EPSP's are in fact essential for the computational power of the model.

Reference: W. Maass and B. Ruf. On the relevance of the shape of postsynaptic potentials for the computational power of networks of spiking neurons. In Proc. of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks ICANN, pages 515-520, Paris, 1995. EC2&Cie.