POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access Memory capacity of networks with stochastic binary synapses

Lesion studies suggest that episodic memories are initially stored in the hippocampus, but are then transferred to cortex where a long-term memory trace is stored. This suggests that in the hippocampus, memories have to be acquired in one shot, while in cortex, they are acquired slowly over multiple repetitions. In the present work, we study the memory capacity of networks that have to acquire memories either in one shot, or through multiple presentations. To allow for analytical tractability we used networks of N binary neurons connected with binary synapses. Stochastic Hebbian-type synaptic plasticity occurs upon pattern pre-sentation, and two parameters q+ and q- control the amounts of potentiation and depression, as in [1,2]. Stored patterns are random, sparse and uncorrelated, and ar