Heeger, David
<p>Apr 12, 2018 10:36 PM</p>
<p>
see his talk on April 18, 2018 in Psych Colloq Wednes at 3:45PM</p>
<p>
<b><u>Canonical Computation in Brains and Machines
</u></b>
<b>Abstract</b>: Working memory is a cognitive process that is responsible for temporarily holding and manipulating information. Most of the empirical neuroscience research on working memory has focused on measuring sustained activity in <b>prefrontal cortex (PFC) and/or parietal cortex</b> during simple delayed-response tasks, and most of the models of working memory have been based on neural integrators.</p>
<p>
But working memory means much more than just holding a piece of information online. I will present a new theory of working memory, based on a recurrent neural circuit that I call<b> ORGaNICs (Oscillatory Recurrent GAted Neural Integrator Circuits). ORGaNICs are a variety of LSTMs </b>(imported from the machine learning/AI literature) that can be used to explain the complex dynamics of delay-period activity in real neural circuits during a working memory task, and that offer some computational advantages over conventional artificial recurrent neural nets. Time permitting, I’ll also say a few words about inference, exploration, prediction, and the role of feedback (top-down) in the brain.</p>
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