Learning flexible sensori-motor mappings in a complex network

  • Authors:
  • Eleni Vasilaki;Stefano Fusi;Xiao-Jing Wang;Walter Senn

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Bern, Institute of Physiology, Buehlplatz 5, 3012, Bern, Switzerland and Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience, EPFL, Station 15, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland;ETH/University of Zurich, Institute of Neuroinformatics, Wintherthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Center for Neurobiology and ...;Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Neurobiology, Kavli Institute for Neuroscience, 333 Cedar Street, 06520, New Haven, CT, USA;University of Bern, Institute of Physiology, Buehlplatz 5, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Biological Cybernetics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Given the complex structure of the brain, how can synaptic plasticity explain the learning and forgetting of associations when these are continuously changing? We address this question by studying different reinforcement learning rules in a multilayer network in order to reproduce monkey behavior in a visuomotor association task. Our model can only reproduce the learning performance of the monkey if the synaptic modifications depend on the pre- and postsynaptic activity, and if the intrinsic level of stochasticity is low. This favored learning rule is based on reward modulated Hebbian synaptic plasticity and shows the interesting feature that the learning performance does not substantially degrade when adding layers to the network, even for a complex problem.