Traveling waves are commonly observed across the brain. While previous studies have suggested the role of traveling waves in learning, the mechanism is still unclear. We adopted a computational approach to investigate the effect of traveling waves on synaptic plasticity. Our results indicate that traveling waves facilitate learning of distant and indirectly connected network-paths when combined with a reward-based local synaptic plasticity rule. We  demonstrate that traveling waves expedite finding the shortest paths and learning nonlinear input/output-mapping, such as the XOR function.
Traveling waves are commonly observed across the brain. While previous studies have suggested the role of traveling waves in learning, the mechanism is still unclear. We adopted a computational approach to investigate the effect of traveling waves on synaptic plasticity. Our results indicate that traveling waves facilitate the learning of poly-synaptic network-paths when combined with a reward-dependent local synaptic plasticity rule. We also demonstrate that traveling waves expedite finding the shortest paths and learning nonlinear input/output-mapping, such as exclusive or (XOR) function.
R
learning of distant and indirectly connected
the learning of poly-synaptic
R
reward-based
reward-dependent
A
also
R
the XOR
exclusive or (XOR)