Experiment
The first major experimental confirmation of BCM came in 1992 in investigating LTP and LTD in the hippocampus. The data showed qualitative agreement with the final form of the BCM activation function. This experiment was later replicated in the visual cortex, which BCM was originally designed to model. This work provided further evidence of the necessity for a variable threshold function for stability in Hebbian-type learning (BCM or others).
Experimental evidence has been non-specific to BCM until Rittenhouse et al. confirmed BCM's prediction of synapse modification in the visual cortex when one eye is selectively closed. Specifically,
where describes the variance in spontaneous activity or noise in the closed eye and is time since closure. Experiment agreed with the general shape of this prediction and provided an explanation for the dynamics of monocular eye closure (monocular deprivation) versus binocular eye closure. The experimental results are far from conclusive, but so far have favored BCM over competing theories of plasticity.
Read more about this topic: BCM Theory
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