Impact of axonal delay on structure development in a multi-layered network

Abstract

The mechanisms underlying how activity in the visual pathway gives rise through neural plasticity to many features observed experimentally in early stages of visual processing was provided by Linsker in a seminal, three-paper series. Owing to the complexity of multi-layer models, an implicit assumption in Linsker's and subsequent papers has been that propagation delay is homogeneous, playing little functional role in neural behavior. In this paper, we relax this assumption to examine the impact of distance-dependent axonal propagation delay on neural learning. We show that propagation delay induces low-pass filtering by dispersing arrival times of spikes from presynaptic neurons, providing a..