Discrete cortical representations and their stability in the presence of synaptic turnover

Population imaging in mouse auditory cortex revealed clustering of neural responses to brief complex sounds: the activity of a local population typically falls close to one out of a small number of observed states [1]. These clusters appear to group sets of auditory stimuli into a discrete set of activity patterns and could thereby form the basis for representations of sound categories. However, to be useful for the brain, such representations should be robust against fluctuations in the underlying circuitry, which are significant even in the absences of any explicit learning paradigm [2]. Here we introduce a novel firing rate based circuit model of mouse auditory cortex to study the emerge…