O. Melamed, W. Gerstner, W. Maass, M. Tsodyks, and H. Markram
A major challenge to understanding behavior is how the nervous system allows
the learning of behavioral sequences that can occur over arbitrary
timescales, ranging from milliseconds up to seconds, using a fixed
millisecond learning rule. This article describes some potential solutions,
and then focuses on a study by Mehta et al. that could contribute towards
solving this puzzle. They have discovered that an experience-dependent
asymmetric shape of hippocampal receptive fields combined with oscillatory
inhibition can serve to map behavioral sequences on a fixed timescale.