Synaptic efficacy cluster formation across the dendrite via STDP

The role of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) in shaping the strength of a synapse located on the dendritic tree has gained recent interest. Previous theoretical studies using STDP have mostly used simplified integrate-and-fire models to investigate the evolution of synaptic efficacy with time. Such studies usually show that the final weight distribution is unimodal or bimodal resulting from a multiplicative or additive STDP rule, respectively. However, very little is known about how STDP shapes the spatial organization of synaptic efficacies. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate that spatial clustering of synaptic efficacies can occur on the dendrite via STDP, where changes in synaptic efficacy are driven by timing differences between synaptic inputs and the generation of local dendritic spikes. Specifically, when the model neuron is stimulated by two independent groups of correlated afferent inputs, the synaptic efficacies from each group, are not only spatially clustered on the dendrite but also spatially complementary to each other.