The pf synaptic transmission was calibrated to match responses evoked by random input patterns (Dittman et al., 2000), ensuring that pf synapses could precisely reproduce the temporal dynamics of short-term synaptic plasticity. The aa were made identical to pf synapses but were located on distal rather than proximal dendrites. A potentiation of the aa (Sims and Hartell, 2005, 2006; Walter et al., 2009) was required to counterbalance the longer electronic distance (L = 1.4 vs. L = 0.4) from soma (Roth and Häusser, 2001), thus ensuring the reported functional equivalence of aa and pf synapses (Walter et al., 2009).