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Abstract:
Human and animal studies show that mammalian brain undergoes
massive synaptic pruning during childhood, removing about half of
the synapses until puberty. We have previously shown that
maintaining network memory performance while synapses are deleted,
requires that synapses are properly modified and pruned, removing
the weaker synapses. We now show that neuronal regulation, a
mechanism recently observed to maintain the average neuronal input
field, results in weight-dependent synaptic modification. Under the
correct range of the degradation dimension and synaptic upper
bound, neuronal regulation removes the weaker synapses and
judiciously modifies the remaining synapses. It implements near
optimal synaptic modification, and maintains the memory performance
of a network undergoing massive synaptic pruning. Thus, this paper
shows that in addition to the known effects of Hebbian changes,
neuronal regulation may play an important role in the
self-organization of brain networks during development.
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