Effects of compensation, connectivity and tau in a computational model of Alzheimer´s Disease

This work updates an existing, simplistic computational model of Alzheimer´s Disease (AD) to investigate the behaviour of synaptic compensatory mechanisms in neural networks with small-world connectivity, and varying methods of calculating compensation. It additionally introduces a method for simulating tau neurofibrillary pathology, resulting in a more dramatic damage profile. Small-world connectivity is shown to have contrasting effects on capacity, retrieval time, and robustness to damage, whilst the use of more easily-obtained remote memories rather than recent memories for synaptic compensation is found to lead to rapid network damage.