![]() ![]() What is needed therefore is a rodent behavior that involves complex decision making, with many input variables and many possible choices. Remarkably, they are learned exceedingly slowly: a mouse typically requires many weeks of shaping and thousands of trials to reach asymptotic performance a monkey may require many months ( Carandini and Churchland, 2013). The tasks are of low complexity, typically a one bit decision based on 1 or 2 bits of input. Canonical examples are a monkey reporting motion in a visual stimulus by saccading its eyes ( Newsome and Paré, 1988), and a mouse in a box classifying stimuli by moving its forelimbs or the tongue ( Burgess et al., 2017 Guo et al., 2014). In the attempt to identify more generalizable mechanisms of learning and decision making, one route has been to train laboratory animals on abstract tasks with tightly specified sensory inputs that are linked to motor outputs via arbitrary contingency rules. They are likely implemented by specialized brain circuits, and indeed great progress has been made in localizing these operations to the accessory olfactory bulb ( Brennan and Keverne, 1997) and the cortical amygdala ( LeDoux, 2000). These learning systems appear designed for special purposes, they perform very specific associations, and govern binary behavioral decisions. Another form of rapid learning accessible to laboratory experiments is fear conditioning, where a formerly innocuous stimulus gets associated with a painful experience, leading to subsequent avoidance of the stimulus ( Fanselow and Bolles, 1979 Bourtchuladze et al., 1994). ![]() Here, the female mouse forms an olfactory memory of her mating partner that allows her to terminate the pregnancy if she encounters another male that threatens infanticide. In laboratory studies, one prominent instance of one-shot learning is the Bruce effect ( Bruce, 1959). Clearly, such rapid acquisition of new associations or of new motor skills can confer enormous survival advantages. How can animals or machines acquire the ability for complex behaviors from one or a few experiences? Canonical examples include language learning in children, where new words are learned after just a few instances of their use, or learning to balance a bicycle, where humans progress from complete incompetence to near perfection after crashing once or a few times. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |