Topic: Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity

Although changes in synaptic efficacy are widely thought to be a substrate for memory storage in the brain, the rules of synaptic plasticity are difficult to assess in vivo and thus remain unclear. We considered the dynamics of hippocampal representations as an indirect indicator of ongoing plasticity during memory formation and familiarization. Using calcium imaging data from mice navigating virtual tracks, during which CA1 or CA3 neurons were recorded, we tracked the evolution of the spatial modulation of their activity (place fields) lap by lap. During exploration of a novel environment, 50

Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity (BTSP) is a type of synaptic plasticity in which large, Ca2+ plateau potentials in hippocampal pyramidal cells drive the formation of hippocampal fields such as place fields. BTSP differentiates itself from typical forms of plasticity by a) learning pre-post correlations on the timescales of seconds and b) learning in a one-to-few-shot manner. Though BTSP has been posited to be the primary driver of field formation in hippocampus, theoretical models that describe the population-level computations of hippocampus (such as the formation of "cognitive" or "