catalinasaini/lascon_project

A thalamocortical model of post-sleep memory improvement

Bruna V. Tiburcio 1, Catalina Saini 2 and Flavio R. Rusch 3 (1) Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. (2) Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile. (3) Department of Physics, FFCLRP, University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, SP, Brazil.

Abstract

Sleep is a widespread occurrence in the animal kingdom that has been beneficial to cognitive and mnemonic tasks. However, chronic sleep deprivation can be detrimental. Despite its importance, a complete understanding of the functions and underlying mechanisms of sleep is still lacking. Sleep slow wave activity and sharp-wave ripples positively affect memory consolidation by reorganizing internal representations of learned patterns [1]. Additionally, mechanistic candidates, such as projections from the thalamus to the cortex (bottom-top) and cognitive predictions signaled from the cortex to the thalamus (top-down), are proposed to explain those phenomena [2, 3]. Here, by means of the Nest simulator [4], we intend to reproduce the neuronal network model presented in [5]. That paper highlights the interesting effects of deep-sleep-like slow oscillations activity on a simplified thalamocortical model used to encode, retrieve, and classify images of handwritten dig- its. Neuron dynamics are adaptative exponential (AdEx) type. The findings of this study provided valuable insights into the underlying mechanisms involved in neural processing during sleep. To evaluate memory enhancement, we will train the networks to recognize handwritten digits from the MNIST dataset as made in [5]. By reproducing and replicating the outcomes reported in [5], we hope to provide a detailed account of their model development and findings.

Keywords

Reproducibility, Nest simulator, Adaptative exponential neurons, slow oscillations

References

[1] Walker, M.P., Stickgold, R.: Sleep, memory, and plasticity. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 57, 139–166 (2006) [2] Wei, Y., Krishnan, G.P., Bazhenov, M.: Synaptic mechanisms of mem- ory consolidation during sleep slow oscillations. Journal of Neuroscience 36(15), 4231–4247 (2016) [3] Wei, Y., Krishnan, G.P., Komarov, M., Bazhenov, M.: Differential roles of sleep spindles and sleep slow oscillations in memory consolidation. PLoS computational biology 14(7), 1006322 (2018) [4] Kunkel, S., Deepu, R., Plesser, H.E., Golosio, B., Lepperød, M.E., Eppler, J.M., Mahmoudian, S., Hahne, J., Plotnikov, D., Bachmann, C., et al.: Nest 2.12. 0. Technical report, Ju ̈lich Supercomputing Center (2017) [5] Capone, C., Pastorelli, E., Golosio, B., Paolucci, P.S.: Sleep-like slow oscillations improve visual classification through synaptic homeostasis and memory association in a thalamo-cortical model. Scientific reports 9(1), 8990 (2019)