Effects of short-time plasticity on the associative memory

We study how short-time synaptic plasticity influences the performance of associative memory networks. By mean-field analysis and numerical simulations it is shown that under appropriate rescaling of the firing threshold, the synaptic dynamics does not alter the retrieval states but affects their stability, resulting in a lower storage capacity in the case of depression. Beyond the storage capacity, the network operates in an oscillatory regime which is not observed in networks with static connections. We also found that dynamical properties of synapses and their heterogeneity can be useful for switching between memory states and the storage of pattern sequences. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved