Auditory habituation via spike-timing dependent plasticity in recurrent neural circuits

This paper presents evidence that spiking neuron models of parts of the human auditory system demonstrate habituation to real auditory word stimuli. This is accomplished via the simple addition of a model of spike-timing dependent plasticity to synapses. This result is interesting because the base neural circuit has also been used for pragmatically useful behaviors such as speech recognition. The model increases our understanding of the neural basis for behaviors in the developing human infant by showing that habituation learning can be implemented in the same neural substrate that underlies other types of learning (such as permanent word-learning).