Skewing the Perceptron: Modeling the Importance of System-Level Manipulation When Investigating Long-Term Potentiation

Manipulation of learning processes in the brain has proven to be experimentally challenging. Various studies have focused on specific components of Long-Term Potentiation (LTP), attempting to systematically regulate the learning progress through manipulation of its proposed elements. The manipulation of such elements is thought to result in a proportional change in the efficacy of the whole system. Based on the inadequate results of this approach, we hypothesized that changes implemented to a fraction of synapses in a network represented an incomplete investigation of LTP function.