title: Temporal map formation in the barn owl's brain.
abstract: Barn owls provide an experimentally well-specified example of a temporal map, a neuronal representation of the outside world in the brain by means of time. Their laminar nucleus exhibits a place code of interaural time differences, a cue which is used to determine the azimuthal location of a sound stimulus, e.g., prey. We analyze a model of synaptic plasticity that explains the formation of such a representation in the young bird and show how in a large parameter regime a combination of local and nonlocal synaptic plasticity yields the temporal map as found experimentally. Our analysis includes the effect of nonlinearities as well as the influence of neuronal noise.
authors.affiliation: Physik Department, Technische Universität München, 85747 Garching bei München, Germany.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Leibold
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kempter
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: van Hemmen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D008564:Membrane Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009475:Neurons, Afferent / Q000502:physiology; D020305:Strigiformes / Q000502:physiology*; D013569:Synapses / Q000502:physiology