Related papers: The Structure of Systematicity in the Brain
Large-scale white matter pathways crisscrossing the cortex create a complex pattern of connectivity that underlies human cognitive function. Generative mechanisms for this architecture have been difficult to identify in part because little…
A remarkable feature of human beings is their capacity for creative behaviour, referring to their ability to react to problems in ways that are novel, surprising, and useful. Transformational creativity is a form of creativity where the…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
This paper describes a process for combining patterns and features, to guide a search process and make predictions. It is based on the functionality that a human brain might have, which is a highly distributed network of simple neuronal…
Topological techniques have become a popular tool for studying information flows in neural networks. In particular, simplicial homology theory is used to analyze how cognitive representations of space emerge from large conglomerates of…
We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…
Human learning is a complex process in which future behavior is altered via the reorganization of brain activity and connectivity. It remains unknown whether activity and connectivity differentially reorganize during learning, and, if so,…
The brain is immensely complex, with diverse components and dynamic interactions building upon one another to orchestrate a wide range of functions and behaviors. Understanding patterns of these complex interactions and how they are…
How is it that humans can solve complex planning tasks so efficiently despite limited cognitive resources? One reason is its ability to know how to use its limited computational resources to make clever choices. We postulate that people…
Animals thrive in a constantly changing environment and leverage the temporal structure to learn well-factorized causal representations. In contrast, traditional neural networks suffer from forgetting in changing environments and many…
The spiking activity of principal cells in mammalian hippocampus encodes an internalized neuronal representation of the ambient space---a cognitive map. Once learned, such a map enables the animal to navigate a given environment for a long…
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 can learn individual episodes and generalizable rules and also successfully retain both kinds of acquired knowledge over time. In the cognitive science literature, (1) learning individual episodes and rules and (2) learning and…
Functional networks provide a topological description of activity patterns in the brain, as they stem from the propagation of neural activity on the underlying anatomical or structural network of synaptic connections. This latter is well…
Spatial awareness in mammals is based on internalized representations of the environment---cognitive maps---encoded by networks of spiking neurons. Although behavioral studies suggest that these maps can remain stable for long periods, it…
The accumulation of adaptations in an open-ended manner during lifetime learning is a holy grail in reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivation, artificial curiosity, and developmental robotics. We present a specification for a cognitive…
The human brain can be considered to be a graphical structure comprising of tens of billions of biological neurons connected by synapses. It has the remarkable ability to automatically re-route information flow through alternate paths in…
Memory is inherently entangled with prediction and planning. Flexible behavior in biological and artificial agents depends on the interplay of learning from the past and predicting the future in ever-changing environments. This chapter…
One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency and flexibility. Efficiency is especially impressive because plans must often be made in complex…
The functioning of an organ such as the brain emerges from interactions between its constituent parts. Further, this interaction is not immutable in time but rather unfolds in a succession of patterns, thereby allowing the brain to adapt to…