PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Luiz Tauffer AU - Arvind Kumar TI - Short-Term Synaptic Plasticity Makes Neurons Sensitive to the Distribution of Presynaptic Population Firing Rates AID - 10.1523/ENEURO.0297-20.2021 DP - 2021 Mar 01 TA - eneuro PG - ENEURO.0297-20.2021 VI - 8 IP - 2 4099 - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0297-20.2021.short 4100 - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0297-20.2021.full SO - eNeuro2021 Mar 01; 8 AB - The ability to discriminate spikes that encode a particular stimulus from spikes produced by background activity is essential for reliable information processing in the brain. We describe how synaptic short-term plasticity (STP) modulates the output of presynaptic populations as a function of the distribution of the spiking activity and find a strong relationship between STP features and sparseness of the population code, which could solve this problem. Furthermore, we show that feedforward excitation followed by inhibition (FF-EI), combined with target-dependent STP, promote substantial increase in the signal gain even for considerable deviations from the optimal conditions, granting robustness to this mechanism. A simulated neuron driven by a spiking FF-EI network is reliably modulated as predicted by a rate analysis and inherits the ability to differentiate sparse signals from dense background activity changes of the same magnitude, even at very low signal-to-noise conditions. We propose that the STP-based distribution discrimination is likely a latent function in several regions such as the cerebellum and the hippocampus.