Learning Temporally Encoded Patterns in Networks of Spiking Neurons

Networks of spiking neurons are very powerful and versatile models for biological and artificial information processing systems. Especially for modelling pattern analysis tasks in a biologically plausible way that require short response times with high precision they seem to be more appropriate than networks of threshold gates or models that encode analog values in average firing rates. We investigate the question how neurons can learn on the basis of time differences between firing times. In particular, we provide learning rules of the Hebbian type in terms of single spiking events of the pre- and postsynaptic neuron and show that the weights approach some value given by the difference between pre- and postsynaptic firing times with arbitrary high precision.