Methods
Our model contains 4 populations of rate-coded units with sigmoid activation functions that are either not or fully connected via activity modulated Hebbian synapses (see Figure 1). A vestibular apparatus (VA) senses the tilt level of the modeled organism. VA is connected to a hidden population (HL) connected to a motor control population (BA), generating balancing actions and thereby closing a control loop by influencing the current tilt level. A second loop, the biofeedback, contains a population mimicking the signal of the mentioned tongue strip (TS).
VA and TS create population-coded output because their units are broadly tuned to different preferred tilt levels. HL and BA use winner take all dynamics. All units receive, in addition to the afferent input, a constant amount of white noise. Feedback connections from BA to HL force these populations to commit to a common, converged state.
Destroyed VA-units reduce the total input to HL. Homeostatic input normalization iteratively strengthens remaining postsynaptic processes to regain the desired input strength.