Temporal Coding using the Response Properties of Spiking Neurons

In biological neurons, the timing of a spike depends on the timing of synaptic currents, in a way that is classically described by the Phase Response Curve. This has implications for temporal coding: an action potential that arrives on a synapse has an implicit meaning, that depends on the position of the postsynaptic neuron on the firing cycle. Here we show that this implicit code can be used to perform computations. Using theta neurons, we derive a spike-timing dependent learning rule from an error criterion. We demonstrate how to train an auto-encoder neural network using this rule.