Just to start off, we are going to go over a quick background on my paper and some terms to get a better understanding beforehand. The paper I was assigned is called, Information Processing with Population Codes. It is written by Alexandre Pouget, Peter Dayan, and Richard Zemel. Alexandre Pouget is a professor at the Neuroscience Centre at the University of Geneva. There he leads the computational cognitive neuroscience laboratory; his research focuses on theories of representation and computation within Neural Circuits. Alexandre Pouget is the lead author of this paper.
This paper focuses on neural coding and population codes, which are heavily interrelated. Neural Coding is a field in Cognitive Science that is concerned with the
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This is where the start of population coding formed. I personally find it amazing that we can compare two separate things that are unlike in many ways such as computers and our nervous system. There are so many things that are similar even though they are so unlike, such as there is one thing controlling the whole system like in our bodies our nervous system controls us.
An example of the population coding that is presented within the paper is “place cells” within rats. We are able to use these cells to show the animals location with regards to a centred reference frame in the surrounding environment of the rat. In this experiment, they use a small maze, each area is characterized by one of these “place cells”. Within this area there is a small region of the maze that is triggered and sends a response. Through observing the rats, they saw that there was a spatial overlap between the fields and thus, they concluded that the cells would respond to any location that they are given. They also found that visual features were also encoded within these population codes, for example, orientation, colour, direction of motion, and depth. So far, it has been shown that our environmental influences effect our behaviour so heavily. Population encoding is very strongly rooted, if one cell is damaged it won’t affect the already encoded representation. Just as if one part of a computer goes, most of the time the remaining parts of the device
A series of simple variables will make up for a complex variable. This can either be through the grouping of such simple variables or the more complex combinations and permutations that nature provides. The scholar proposes that there are eleven control systems about human beings and animals and when put in a hierarchical order, they are: intensity, sensation, configuration, transition, event, relationship, category, sequence, program, principle and system concept (Center, 2016). Despite giving the order, the scholar goes on to say the elements of control systems are autonomous and have absolutely no bearing on each other and this ends up being a major shortcoming of the PTC theory.
Carr does not present his theory on cognition with only his own opinion and reason; he adds many different resources from which he compiled information in support of his argument, including that from many prominent scientists in the field of neuroscience. However, Carr only seems to focus on the fact that technology
After investigating spatial cognition and the construction of cognitive maps in my previous paper, "Where Am I Going? Where Have I Been: Spatial Cognition and Navigation", and growing in my comprehension of the more complex elements of the nervous system, the development of an informed discussion of human perception has become possible. The formation of cognitive maps, which serve as internal representations of the world, are dependent upon the human capacities for vision and visual perception (1). The objects introduced into the field of vision are translated into electrical messages, which activate the neurons of the retina. The resultant retinal message is organized into several forms of sensation and is
5 in Nature Neuroscience. De Lecea is the senior author. The lead author is postdoctoral scholar Ada Eban-Rothschild, PhD.
Qualities of perseverance, resiliency, and trust encompass the foundation of learning from experiences. A series of intersecting realities, both the trivial and major, encompass the foundation of our lives. In essence, we act as mice running through the maze of life. Researchers at MIT report that an animal’s knowledge from a previous situation can subconsciously influence behavior in new circumstances, shedding light on how our backgrounds inform future choices. When a mouse explores a new maze, neurons fire in its hippocampus, the center of learning and memory. Individual neurons fire in a specific pattern that mimics a mouse’s movement through space. From looking at the patterns and sequences from the firing cells, researchers can determine
Throughout the text, the word ‘neocortex’ is brought up a plentiful amount of times. Over time, the idea of certain items evolves into complex statements that’ll potentially be understood by the reader after they endure the various explanations over a chapter or more. To exemplify this, the term ‘neocortex’ first appears in the introduction; where the basic description of its responsibility to deal with patterns of information(10). Further along, in chapter three, the same term advances into a labyrinth of connections. Not only does this mass, that consists of eighty percent of the human brain, influence memory patterns and such, but that it, “is a comparable hierarchy of pattern recognizers processing actual images of objects...and a hierarchy of concepts… and a hierarchy of thought,”(49). What this means is that our memory is prone to a humans main five senses: smell, sight, hearing, touch, and taste. If one
In addition to studies in species populations, using genetic analysis allows scientists to understand evolutionary patterns in neuroscience, further adding to the body of evidence which proves evolution as fact. Genetic information is inherited from one’s ancestors and as such, determining the relatedness of genetic codes allows biologists to construct a family tree, showing how closely related various members of a family are. Using this logic, a similar method can be used to create an evolutionary tree of life, showing organisms which descended from common ancestors. These trees of life are important because they can be used to show where particular traits begin to appear. Irreducible complexity is an argument from deniers of evolution and
A. attention getter: Your body comprises copious quantities of nervous system cells referred to as neurons. This numerous supply of them can be up to trillions, where about 100 billion inhibit the brain itself. “The number of ways information travels in the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the universe” conveys faculty.washington.edu. Neurons are divergent from other
We describe the results of quantitative information theoretic analyses of neural encoding, particularly in the primate visual, olfactory, taste, hippocampal, and orbitofrontal cortex. Most of the information turns out to be encoded by the firing rates of the neurons that is by the number of spikes in a short time window. This has been shown to be a robust code, for the firing rate representations of different neurons are close to independent for small populations of neurons. Moreover, the information can be read fast from such encoding, in as little as 20 ms. In quantitative information theoretic studies, only a little additional information is available in temporal encoding involving stimulus-dependent synchronization of different neurons,
The brain’s ability to learn, to change in response to experience and to store/retrieve learning through memory it is a fascinating process fundamental to one’s existence. The first scientific study of animal learning demonstrated a form of associative learning - classical conditioning; it can be described as a process of learning where a neutral stimulus (e.g. bell) is paired with an unconditional stimulus (e.g. food) and as a consequence, the neutral stimulus becomes conditioned and comes to elicit the same
The theory further explains that the ability to form a visual image of a word is dependent on whether the word is abstract or concrete. It is generally easier for people to form a visual image of a concrete word and therefore a concrete word is better recalled in an experiment than an abstract word. Research has consistently demonstrated that remembering the word through visualizing it and concrete words, which allow the person to visualize the word easier, are more effective than verbal association and abstract words. One source of evidence for the dual-code theory comes from a series of experiments conducted by Paivio, Smythe and Yuille (1968). In the study the main variable being manipulated was the classification of words as abstract or concrete. They investigated how well student participants recalled paired words that were high-imagery (ex. letter, dress,and juggler) to words that were low-imagery (ex. effort, necessity, and quality). The word lists were combined so that one list contained words that were high-imagery and another list contained words that were low-imagery. There were also lists that combined words that were high and low in imagery. The participants were not given any particular instructions in terms of how to remember the
Research on the processing of visual stimuli have lead to findings that supports the notion of hierarchal modelling in the brain. Hubel and Wiesel (1968) discovered the hierarchal coding of neural cells in the primary visual cortex. Complex cells in this cortex
What this theory leaves unclear is how the brain integrates more than one source of sensory information (i.e. supermodal information) to form a representation of a concept. The brain contains entire areas of cortex that lie between sensory and motor areas that appear to be ‘convergent zones’, that is they bind information from two or more modalities [3,7, 15, 24]. Thereafter, convergent zones then converge onto even higher cortices to form representations [13]. These supermodal areas could help capture the similarities and differences between semantic categories, allowing one to understand the difference between a ‘cat’ and ‘dog’, due to differences in the objects attributes, despite their similarity as pets. Also unclear is if emotion effects the representation of a concept, which
The idea of creating a synthetic consciousness has fascinated the human imagination for many a century. These range from the ancient Pygmalion’s Galatea, the mythological golem, Victorian automatons, to our more recent fancies- computers, robots and other Turing machines. Perhaps the reason for this preoccupation with artificial intelligence is actually a quest to better understand our own consciousness.
or they will have to prove that their card is theirs or they could be