TY - JOUR T1 - Short-Term Synaptic Plasticity Makes Neurons Sensitive to the Distribution of Presynaptic Population Firing Rates JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0297-20.2021 VL - 8 IS - 2 SP - ENEURO.0297-20.2021 AU - Luiz Tauffer AU - Arvind Kumar Y1 - 2021/03/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0297-20.2021.abstract N2 - 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. ER -