Related papers: Navigation through the complex world -- the neurop…
The hippocampus and the striatum support episodic and procedural memory, respectively, and "place" and "response" learning within spatial navigation. Recently this dichotomy has been linked to "model-based" and "model-free" reinforcement…
The study of navigation behaviour and the associated brain dynamics have been a focus increasing research over the last decades. Coinciding with this has been an increased focus on a more ecological understanding of cognition. Here we…
It is now widely accepted that one of the roles of the hippocampus is to maintain episodic spatial representations, while parallel striatal pathways contribute to both declarative and procedural value computations by encoding different…
With the fast and unstoppable evolution of robotics and artificial intelligence, effective autonomous navigation in real-world scenarios has become one of the most pressing challenges in the literature. However, demanding requirements, such…
This thesis is a compendium of research which brings together ideas from the fields of Complex Networks and Computational Neuroscience to address two questions regarding neural systems: 1) How the activity of neurons, via synaptic changes,…
How are people able to plan so efficiently despite limited cognitive resources? We aimed to answer this question by extending an existing model of human task decomposition that can explain a wide range of simple planning problems by adding…
The relationship between brain structure and function has been probed using a variety of approaches, but how the underlying structural connectivity of the human brain drives behavior is far from understood. To investigate the effect of…
A variety of behaviors like spatial navigation or bodily motion can be formulated as graph traversal problems through cognitive maps. We present a neural network model which can solve such tasks and is compatible with a broad range of…
For complex life to evolve, a sophisticated nervous system for handling its complexities was fundamental. The demand resulted in the emergence of brain's computational facility, the neuronal network. This facet of the brain is attested…
Navigation is believed to be controlled by at least two partially dissociable systems in the brain. The cognitive map informs an organism of its location and bearing, updated by integrating vestibular self-motion or predicting distances to…
The brain is a complex system comprising a myriad of interacting elements, posing significant challenges in understanding its structure, function, and dynamics. Network science has emerged as a powerful tool for studying such intricate…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
Dynamics play a critical role in computation. The principled evolution of states over time enables both biological and artificial networks to represent and integrate information to make decisions. In the past few decades, significant…
Understanding how decision making changes across the lifespan is a central challenge for neuroscience, yet research on cognitive aging has remained largely disconnected from the theoretical and computational advances that now shape modern…
Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a range…
We present a computational and theoretical model of the neural mechanisms underlying human decision-making. We propose a detailed model of the interaction between brain regions, under a proposer-predictor-actor-critic framework.…
Current theories of decision making suggest that the neural circuits in mammalian brains (including humans) computationally combine representations of the past (memory), present (perception), and future (agentic goals) to take actions that…