Topic: context-dependent dendritic gating

Neuronal assemblies — groups of neurons with strong recurrent connectivity — are thought to be the basic building blocks of perception and memory in the brain: representations of specific concepts. Activation of an assembly signals the presence of its associated concept to downstream targets. An efficient implementation should allow similar concepts to be represented by similar assemblies, sharing a subset of neurons. However, learning overlapping assemblies in computational models is difficult. Similar assemblies tend to either merge or diverge during the learning process. The same mechanism