Friction effects on collective mechanisms of short term memory

Abstract

Short term memory is often correlated with persistent changes in neuronal firing rates in response to transient inputs. This thesis models the persistent maintenance of an analog eye position signal by an oculomotor neural integrator receiving transient eye movement commands. We show analytically how using neurons with multiple bistable dendritic compartments can enhance the robustness of eye fixations to mistuning while reproducing the observed linear relationship between neuronal firing rates and eye position. We calculate the network dynamics and tolerance to mistuning. Finally, we demonstrate that dendritic bistability can improve robustness in a biophysically realistic network of conductance based neurons.