Wolfgang Maass, Thomas Natschlaeger, Inst for Theoretical Computer Science, T.U. Graz, Klosterwiegasse 32/2, A-8010 Graz, Austria
A theoretical model for analog computation in networks of spiking neurons with temporal coding is introduced and tested through simulation in GENESIS. It turns out that the use of multiple synapses yields very noise-robust mechanisms for analog computations via the timing of single spikes in networks of detailed compartmental neural models. One arrives in this way at a method for emulating arbitrary Hopfield nets with spiking neurons in temporal coding, yielding new models for associative recall of spatio-temporal firing patterns. We also show that it suffices to store these patterns in the efficacies of excitatory synapses. A corresponding layered architecture yields a refinement of the synfire-chain model that can assume a fairly large set of different stable firing patterns for different inputs.