Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

Working memory (WM) is a key component of most cognitive models, and biologically detailed models of its underlying computational mechanisms become more important as neuroscientific constraints become clearer and AI models become more brain-like. Various WM models based on a diverse set of biologically plausible synaptic and neural plasticity mechanisms have been proposed. Computational models thereof often evaluate a singular mechanism and solve a singular working memory task category. We show that these proposed short-term plasticity mechanisms may not necessarily be competing explanations, but instead yield interesting functional interactions on a wide set of WM tasks and enhance the biological plausibility of spiking neural network models of synaptic WM.