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To compensate for sensory processing delays, the visual system must make predictions to ensure timely and appropriate behaviors. Recent work has found predictive information about the stimulus in neural populations early in vision…
Biological memory solves a problem that eludes current AI: storing specific episodic facts without corrupting general semantic knowledge. Complementary Learning Systems theory explains this through two subsystems - a fast hippocampal system…
The state space of a conventional Hopfield network typically exhibits many different attractors of which only a small subset satisfy constraints between neurons in a globally optimal fashion. It has recently been demonstrated that combining…
Significant challenges exist globally regarding literacy teaching and learning. To address these challenges, key features of how the brain works should be taken into account. First, perception is an active process based in detection of…
The brain has computational capabilities that surpass those of modern systems, being able to solve complex problems efficiently in a simple way. Neuromorphic engineering aims to mimic biology in order to develop new systems capable of…
I hypothesize that re-occurring prior experience of complex systems mobilizes a fast response, whose attractor is encoded by their strongly connected network core. In contrast, responses to novel stimuli are often slow and require the…
Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…
Probabilistic inference offers a principled framework for understanding both behaviour and cortical computation. However, two basic and ubiquitous properties of cortical responses seem difficult to reconcile with probabilistic inference:…
Biological synaptic plasticity exhibits nonlinearities that are not accounted for by classic Hebbian learning rules. Here, we introduce a simple family of generalized nonlinear Hebbian learning rules. We study the computations implemented…
This PhD thesis is focused on the central idea that single neurons in the brain should be regarded as temporally precise and highly complex spatio-temporal pattern recognizers. This is opposed to the prevalent view of biological neurons as…
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations, by applying learned rules to new content (systematicity) and thereby enabling an open-ended number of inferences and actions (generativity). Here, we propose that…
The fundamental `plasticity' of the nervous system (i.e high adaptability at different structural levels) is primarily based on Hebbian learning mechanisms that modify the synaptic connections. The modifications rely on neural activity and…
We demonstrate that our recently introduced stochastic Hebb-like learning rule is capable of learning the problem of timing in general network topologies generated by an algorithm of Watts and Strogatz. We compare our results with a…
Complex systems in the real world can be modeled as a network of connected components. The human brain, as a network of neurons among which the interactions cause perception, is a complex network. Synchronization is a dynamical phenomenon…
Autoassociative networks were proposed in the 80's as simplified models of memory function in the brain, using recurrent connectivity with hebbian plasticity to store patterns of neural activity that can be later recalled. This type of…
The primate heteromodal cortex presents an evident functional modularity at a mesoscopic level, with physiological and anatomical evidence pointing to it as likely substrate of long-term memory. In order to investigate some of its…
Spikes are the currency in central nervous systems for information transmission and processing. They are also believed to play an essential role in low-power consumption of the biological systems, whose efficiency attracts increasing…
Neural correlations play a critical role in sensory information coding. They are of two kinds: signal correlations, when neurons have overlapping sensitivities, and noise correlations from network effects and shared noise. In experiments…
In machine learning, error back-propagation in multi-layer neural networks (deep learning) has been impressively successful in supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. As a model for learning in the brain, however, deep learning has…
The neocortex, a complex system driving multi-region interactions, remains a core puzzle in neuroscience. Despite quantitative insights across brain scales, understanding the mechanisms underlying neural activities is challenging. Advances…