Before revision:  Experiments show that long-term synaptic plasticity evolves on a much slower timescale than the cellular mechanisms driving the activity of neuronal cells. For this reason a scaling model of our stochastic model is also introduced and averaging principles for a sub-class of plasticity kernels are stated, and proved in a companion paper. These results are used to analyze two STDP models widely used in applied physics: Pair-based rules and calcium-based rules. We compare results of computational neuroscience on models of timing-based synaptic plasticity with our results derived from averaging principles .
After revision:  Several aspects of these models are discussed and compared to canonical models of computational neuroscience on models of timing-based synaptic plasticity with our results derived from averaging principles .