Related papers: The Mind Grows Circuits
A substantial amount of time and energy has been invested to develop machine vision using connectionist (neural network) principles. Most of that work has been inspired by theories advanced by neuroscientists and behaviorists for how…
Memory is often defined as the mental capacity of retaining information about facts, events, procedures and more generally about any type of previous experience. Memories are remembered as long as they influence our thoughts, feelings, and…
Predictive processing and active inference posit that the brain is a system performing Bayesian inference on the environment. By virtue of this, a prominent interpretation of predictive processing states that the generative model (a POMDP)…
Neuronal circuits of the cerebral cortex are the structural basis of mammalian cognition. The same qualitative components and connectivity motifs are repeated across functionally specialized cortical areas and mammalian species, suggesting…
The emergence of cognition requires a framework that bridges evolutionary principles with neurocomputational mechanisms. This paper introduces the novel "thoughtseed" framework, proposing that cognition arises from the dynamic interaction…
To learn how cognition is implemented in the brain, we must build computational models that can perform cognitive tasks, and test such models with brain and behavioral experiments. Cognitive science has developed computational models of…
We are at the beginning of a new age in which artificial entities will perform significant amounts of high-level cognitive processing rivaling and even surpassing human thinking. The future belongs to those who can best collaborate with…
Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…
Humans surpass the cognitive abilities of most other animals in our ability to "chunk" concepts into words, and then combine the words to combine the concepts. In this process, we make "infinite use of finite means", enabling us to learn…
We consider the implications of the mathematical analysis of neurone-to-neurone dynamical complex networks. We show how the dynamical behaviour of small scale strongly connected networks lead naturally to non-binary information processing…
At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in a new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain…
From interacting cellular components to networks of neurons and neural systems, interconnected units comprise a fundamental organizing principle of the nervous system. Understanding how their patterns of connections and interactions give…
Knowledge is the most precious asset of humankind. People extract the experience from the data that provide for us the reality through the feelings. Generally speaking, it is possible to see the analogy of knowledge elaboration between…
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A…
The brain is a complex organ characterized by heterogeneous patterns of structural connections supporting unparalleled feats of cognition and a wide range of behaviors. New noninvasive imaging techniques now allow these patterns to be…
We consider a living organism as an observer of the evolution of its environment recording sensory information about the state space X of the environment in real time. Sensory information is sampled and then processed on two levels. On the…
The brain is a paradigmatic example of a complex system as its functionality emerges as a global property of local mesoscopic and microscopic interactions. Complex network theory allows to elicit the functional architecture of the brain in…
It is largely believed that complex cognitive phenomena require the perfect orchestrated collaboration of many neurons. However, this is not what converging experimental evidence suggests. Single neurons, the so-called concept cells, may be…
A popular theory of perceptual processing holds that the brain learns both a generative model of the world and a paired recognition model using variational Bayesian inference. Most hypotheses of how the brain might learn these models assume…