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Category: neuroscience – Page 804

Jun Tani: The self-Organizing Functional Hierarchy: a neuro-robotics study — Part 1

The current talk addresses a crucial problem on how compositionality can be naturally developed in cognitive agents by having iterative sensory-motor interactions with the environment.

The talk highlights a dynamic neural network model, so-called the multiple timescales recurrent neural network (MTRNN) model, which has been applied to a set of experiments on developmental learning of compositional actions performed by a humanoid robot made by Sony. The experimental results showed that a set of reusable behavior primitives were developed in the lower level network that is characterized by its fast timescale dynamics while sequential combinations of these primitives were learned in the higher level, which is characterized by its slow timescale dynamics.

This result suggests that adequate functional hierarchy necessary of generating compositional actions can be developed by utilizing timescale differences imposed at different levels of the network. The talk will also introduce our recent results on applications of an extended model of MTRNN to the problem of learning to recognize dynamic visual patterns on a pixel level. The experimental results indicated that dynamic visual images of compositional human actions can be recognized by self-organizing functional hierarchy when both spatial and temporal constraints are adequately imposed on the network activity. The dynamical systems’ mechanisms for development of the higher-order cognition will be discussed upon reviewing the aforementioned research results.

Jun Tani — Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, KAIST

Prof. Jun Tani received his doctorate degree in electrical engineering from Sophia University in 1995. He worked at Sony Computer Science Lab in Tokyo as a researcher for 8 years and then started his lab as a PI in Riken Brain Science Inst. 12 years ago. He was appointed a visiting associate professor at the Univ. of Tokyo and a visiting researcher in Sony Intelligent Dynamic Lab. He moved to KAIST as a full professor in May, 2012.

He has been interested in neuro-robotics, theoretical problems in cognitive neuroscience, and complex systems. He has authored around 70 journal papers and 90 conference papers. He has been invited for his plenary talks in various international conferences including IEEE ICRA in 2005 and ICANN in 2014. He has served on editorial boards in IEEE Trans. Autonomous Mental Development, Adaptive Behavior, and Frontier in Neurorobotics.

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Controlling Brain Circuits, Behavior, and Emotion Using Light

Summary: A newly developed system dubbed Opto-vTrap can temporarily trap vesicles from being released from brain cells.

Source: Institute for Basic Science.

Controlling signal transmission and reception within the brain circuits is necessary for neuroscientists to achieve a better understanding of the brain’s functions. Communication among neuron and glial cells is mediated by various neurotransmitters being released from the vesicles through exocytosis. Thus, regulating vesicular exocytosis can be a possible strategy to control and understand brain circuits.

Are You Guilty Of These 3 Cognitive Biases In Decision Making?

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors are huddled around a campfire when they suddenly hear the nearby bushes rustling. They have two options: investigate if the movement was caused by small prey such as a rabbit, or flee, assuming there was a predator such as a saber-tooth tiger. The former could lead to a nutritious meal, while the latter could ensure survival. What call do you think our ancestors would have made?

Evolution ensured the survival of those who fled the scene on the margin of safety rather than those who made the best decision by analyzing all possible scenarios. For thousands of years, humans have made snap decisions in fight-or-flight situations. In many ways, the human race learned to survive by jumping to conclusions.

“In modern context, such survival heuristics become myriad cognitive biases,” said Eric Colson, Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix. Let’s look at the most common biases or shortcut decisions that influence organizational leaders and how decision intelligence can come to their rescue.

Study Reveals a Protein’s Key Contribution to Heterogeneity of Neurons

Summary: Just one protein situated on the synapse can profoundly alter how some neurons communicate and implement plasticity.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

The versatility of the nervous system comes from not only the diversity of ways in which neurons communicate in circuits, but also their “plasticity,” or ability to change those connections when new information has to be remembered, when their circuit partners change, or other conditions emerge.

Scientists Develop Wireless-Networks that Allow Brain Circuits to Be Controlled Remotely through Internet

Wireless implantable devices and IoT could manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world due to their minimalistic hardware, low setup cost, ease of use, and customizable versatility.

A new study shows that researchers can remotely control the brain circuits of numerous animals simultaneously and independently through the internet. The scientists believe this newly developed technology can speed up brain research and various neuroscience studies to uncover basic brain functions as well as the underpinnings of various neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at KAIST, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, created a wireless ecosystem with its own wireless implantable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to enable high-throughput neuroscience experiments over the internet. This innovative technology could enable scientists to manipulate the brains of animals from anywhere around the world. The study was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on November 25.

Boosting Memory Performance by Finding Amplitude of Brain Waves and Speeding Oscillations

Summary: Entrainment can safely manipulate brain waves to induce improvements in memory, a new study reveals.

Source: Florida Institute of Technology.

The brain is made of millions of cells called neurons, that send electrical messages to talk to each other in patterns of vertical electric activity called oscillations. By inducing them first, then finding the amplitude of the specific brain waves is improved during memory, ultimately memory performance itself is boosted. Once introduced, what if a person can boost the speed of these oscillations to improve memory? A university study in a journal for adolescents may show we can.

Scientists got an animal to breathe without oxygen

A team of scientists has discovered a technique to keep tadpoles alive despite removing their capacity to breathe — by injecting algae into the little froglets’ brains, turning their heads a bright, almost neon, green.

What the frog? Plants, such as algae, produce oxygen through photosynthesis. Animals, on the other hand, cannot — we typically use lungs or gills to filter it from the environment.

But what if there was a way animals could get the oxygen they need the same way that plants do?

Brain scientists unveil wiring diagram containing 200,000 cells and nearly half billion connections in tiny piece of a mouse’s brain

Detailed map captures 3D shapes of neurons and their synapses in stunning detail and is open to community for neuroscience and machine learning research July 29, 2021…

NoneSeveral different mouse neurons virtually reconstructed in 3D show the complexity of tracing the shapes and branching axons and dendrites within a small piece of the brain.

A team of neuroscientists and engineers at the Allen Institute, Princeton University and Baylor College of Medicine has just released a collection of data that marries a 3D wiring diagram with the function of tens of thousands of neurons to create the most detailed examination of mammalian brain circuitry to date.

The dataset, which is publicly available for anyone in the community to browse and use, maps the fine structures and connectivity of 200,000 brain cells and close to 500 million synapses all contained in a cubic millimeter chunk of mouse brain — approximately the size of a grain of sand — from the visual neocortex, the part of the mammalian brain that processes what we see.

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