{"doi":"10.1101/2025.11.07.687250","title":"Plateau potentials are instructive signals for behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity in the neocortex","abstract":"Learning occurs via the adjustment of synaptic weights across a variety of timescales. The mechanisms supporting these processes, from single-shot to iterative learning, are unclear. The prevailing model in the neocortex, spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP), requires many pairings of precisely coordinated activity. This is difficult to reconcile with single-shot learning in behaving animals. In hippocampus, an alternative form of plasticity driven by plateau potentials (behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity; BTSP) alters synaptic weights in a single trial to reorganize spatial representations. Here we show that layer 5 pyramidal neurons (L5 PNs) of mouse primary visual cortex (V1) exhibit highly prevalent plateau potentials that drive single-shot changes in sensory representations. Spontaneously occurring and experimentally induced plateaus rapidly and persistently modified L5 PN responses to visual stimuli. In acute slices, plateau potentials drove synapse-specific plasticity with few repetitions across seconds-long pairing intervals. Our results demonstrate that plateau potentials in the neocortex rapidly reshape neuronal representations through BTSP. This instructive form of plasticity provides a mechanism for dynamic adjustment of neocortical synaptic weights to support rapid learning.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2025,"id":554717,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":10,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9447,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":270581,"name":"Raúl Mojica Soto-Albors","orcid":"0000-0002-6987-5417","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":121249,"name":"W. Liu","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1452566,"name":"Anna Beltramini","orcid":"0009-0005-1895-8895","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":272746,"name":"Mark T. Harnett","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1243279,"name":"Courtney E. Yaeger","orcid":"0000-0003-2164-4609","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":79,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:54:54.542303Z","pmid":"41279115","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}