Related papers: The whole prefrontal cortex is premotor cortex
In the primary visual cortex of primates and carnivores, functional architecture can be characterized by maps of various stimulus features such as orientation preference (OP), ocular dominance (OD), and spatial frequency. It is a…
Recent advances in general-purpose AI systems with attention-based transformers offer a potential window into how the neocortex and cerebellum, despite their relatively uniform circuit architectures, give rise to diverse functions and,…
How does the neocortex learn and develop the foundations of all our high-level cognitive abilities? We present a comprehensive framework spanning biological, computational, and cognitive levels, with a clear theoretical continuity between…
Many tasks require flexibly modifying perception and behavior based on current goals. Humans can retrieve episodic memories from days to years ago, using them to contextualize and generalize behaviors across novel but structurally related…
In the traditional understanding of the neocortex, sensory information flows up a hierarchy of regions, with each level processing increasingly complex features. Information also flows down the hierarchy via a different set of connections.…
A model of sensory information processing is presented. The model assumes that learning of internal (hidden) generative models, which can predict the future and evaluate the precision of that prediction, is of central importance for…
While the original goal for developing robots is replacing humans in dangerous and tedious tasks, the final target shall be completely mimicking the human cognitive and motor behaviour. Hence, building detailed computational models for the…
In this Habilitation Thesis, I synthesize 10 years of work on the role of the motor system in sensorimotor decision-making. First, a large part of the work we initially performed (2014-2020) questioned the functional role of the motor…
Recent work has shown that multimodal association areas-including frontal, temporal and parietal cortex-are focal points of functional network reconfiguration during human learning and performance of cognitive tasks. On the other hand,…
Mental simulation is a critical cognitive function for goal-directed behavior because it is essential for assessing actions and their consequences. When a self-generated or externally specified goal is given, a sequence of actions that is…
An internal model of the own body can be assumed a fundamental and evolutionary-early representation as it is present throughout the animal kingdom. Such functional models are, on the one hand, required in motor control, for example solving…
The proposed analysis of the currently available experimental results concerning the neural cell activity in the brain area known as hippocampus suggests a particular mechanism of spatial information and memory processing. Below it is…
Evolution and its intelligence element present thrill and challenges in its exploration. Yet, how species have memory, retrieve them and maintain continuity are the fundamental questions. Most of the phenomenon can only be hypothesised by…
A salient feature of prefrontal cortex organization is the vast diversity of cell types that support the temporal integration of events required for sculpting future responses. A major obstacle in understanding the routing of information…
A recent paper (Flesch et al, 2022) describes behavioural and neural data suggesting that task representations are gated in the prefrontal cortex in both humans and macaques. This short note proposes an alternative explanation for the…
Industrial robotic manipulation demands reliable long-horizon execution across embodiments, tasks, and changing object distributions. While Vision-Language-Action models have demonstrated strong generalization, they remain fundamentally…
The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…
Brain stimulation is a powerful tool for understanding cortical function and holds promise for therapeutic interventions in neuropsychiatric disorders. Initial visual prosthetics apply electric microstimulation to early visual cortex which…
Humans can pursue a near-infinite variety of tasks, but typically can only pursue a small number at the same time. We hypothesize that humans leverage experience on one task to preemptively learn solutions to other tasks that were…
This article presents a simple model of the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus loop, which is thought to serve for action selection and executions, and reports the results of its implementation. The model is based on the hypothesis that the…