A single spiking neuron that can represent interval timing: analysis, plasticity and multi-stability

The ability to represent interval timing is crucial for many common behaviors, such as knowing whether to stop when the light turns from green to yellow. Neural representations of interval timing have been reported in the rat primary visual cortex and we have previously presented a computational framework describing how they can be learned by a network of neurons. Recent experimental and theoretical results in entorhinal cortex have shown that single neurons can exhibit persistent activity, previously thought to be generated by a network of neurons. Motivated by these single neuron results, we propose a single spiking neuron model that can learn to compute and represent interval timing. We show that a simple model, reduced analytically to a single dynamical equation, captures the average behavior of the complete high dimensional spiking model very well. Variants of this model can be used to produce bi-stable or multi-stable persistent activity. We also propose a plasticity rule by which this model can learn to represent different intervals and different levels of persistent activity.