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Today several people asked me to send out a 2005 paper (Fusi, Drew, Abbott 2005, Cascade models of synaptically stored memories_)_ showing why a variety of memory maintenance mechanisms with different timescales are better than having just one or two simple memory maintenance mechanisms. Here it is. There's also a followup paper showing why it didn't matter that they used synapses with binary weighting in the 2005 paper: Stefano Fusi & L F Abbott "Limits on the memory storage capacity of bounded synapses" Nat Neuro 10 (4) April 2007 p 485.
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