Learning poly-synaptic paths with traveling waves

Abstract: Traveling waves are commonly observed across the brain. While previous studies have suggested the role of traveling waves in learning, the mechanism is still unclear. We adopted a computational approach to investigate the effect of traveling waves on synaptic plasticity. Our results indicate that traveling waves facilitate the learning of poly-synaptic network-paths when combined with a reward-dependent local synaptic plasticity rule. We also demonstrate that traveling waves expedite finding the shortest paths and learning nonlinear input/output-mapping, such as exclusive or (XOR) function.