Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ryan Calmus, Dr Ben Wilson, Dr Yuki Kikuchi, Professor Christopher Petkov
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Understanding how the brain forms representations of structured information distributed in time is a challenging endeavour for the neuroscientific community, requiring computationally and neurobiologically informed approaches. The neural mechanisms for segmenting continuous streams of sensory input and establishing representations of dependencies remain largely unknown, as do the transformations and computations occurring between the brain regions involved in these aspects of sequence processing. We propose a blueprint for a neurobiologically informed and informing computational model of sequence processing (entitled: Vector-symbolic Sequencing of Binding INstantiating Dependencies, or VS-BIND). This model is designed to support the transformation of serially ordered elements in sensory sequences into structured representations of bound dependencies, readily operates on multiple timescales, and encodes or decodes sequences with respect to chunked items wherever dependencies occur in time. The model integrates established vector symbolic additive and conjunctive binding operators with neurobiologically plausible oscillatory dynamics, and is compatible with modern spiking neural network simulation methods. We show that the model is capable of simulating previous findings from structured sequence processing tasks that engage fronto-temporal regions, specifying mechanistic roles for regions such as prefrontal areas 44/45 and the frontal operculum during interactions with sensory representations in temporal cortex. Finally, we are able to make predictions based on the configuration of the model alone that underscore the importance of serial position information, which requires input from time-sensitive cells, known to reside in the hippocampus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.
Author(s): Calmus R, Wilson B, Kikuchi Y, Petkov CI
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
Year: 2019
Volume: 375
Issue: 1791
Pages: 20190304
Print publication date: 16/12/2019
Acceptance date: 04/11/2019
Date deposited: 02/01/2020
ISSN (print): 0962-8436
ISSN (electronic): 1471-2970
Publisher: The Royal Society Publishing
URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0304
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0304
PubMed id: 31840585
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
