Dynamics of Synaptic Plasticity: A Comparison between Models and Experimental Results in Visual Cortex

Receptive fields in the visual cortex can be altered by changing the visual environment, as has been shown many times in deprivation experiments. In this paper we simulate this set of experiments using two different models of cortical plasticity, BCM and PCA. The visual environment used is composed of natural images for open eye and of noise for closed eyes. We measure the response of the neurons to oriented stimuli, and use the time course information of the neuronal response to provide a preliminary quantitative comparison between the cortical models and experiment.