Coupling an aVLSI neuromorphic vision chip to a neurotrophic model of synaptic plasticity: The development of topography.

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Description/Abstract

We couple a previously-studied, biologically-inspired neurotrophic model of activity-dependent competitive synaptic plasticity and neuronal development to a neuromorphic retina chip. Using this system, we examine the development and refinement of a topographic mapping between an array of afferent neurons (the ``retinal ganglion cells'') and an array of target neurons. We find that the plasticity model can indeed drive topographic refinement in the presence of afferent activity patterns generated by a real-world device. We examine the resilience of the developing system to the presence of high levels of noise by adjusting the spontaneous firing rate of the silicon neurons.