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Predictive Coding
In neuroscience, predictive coding (also known as predictive processing) is a theory of brain function which postulates that the brain is constantly generating and updating a "mental model" of the environment. According to the theory, such a mental model is used to predict input signals from the senses that are then compared with the actual input signals from those senses. With the rising popularity of representation learning, the theory is being actively pursued and applied in machine learning and related fields. The phrase 'predictive coding' is also used in several other disciplines such as signal-processing technologies and law in loosely-related or unrelated senses. Origins Theoretical ancestors to predictive coding date back as early as 1860 with Helmholtz's concept of unconscious inference. Unconscious inference refers to the idea that the human brain fills in visual information to make sense of a scene. For example, if something is relatively smaller than another object i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and Mathematical Modeling, mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the Biology, biological sciences. The scope of neuroscience has broadened over time to include different approaches used to study the nervous system at different scales. The techniques used by neuroscientists have expanded enormously, from molecular biology, molecular and cell biology, cellular studies of individual neurons to neuroimaging, imaging ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection, non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits, or noise. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and the liver, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking in psychology, arguing that just as the heart evolved to pump blood, and the liver evolved to detoxify poisons, there is modularity of mind in that different psychological mechanisms evolved to solve different adaptive problems. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal ''Emotion Review''. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science. Biography Barrett was born in 1963 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to a working poor family and was the first member of her extended family to attend university. After graduating from the University of Toronto with honors, she pursued a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo with the goal of becoming a therapist, until a frustrating puzzle sidetracked her from a clinical career. As a graduate student, she failed eight times to replicate a simple experiment, finally realizing that her seeming failed attempts were, in fact, successfully replicating a previously undiscovered phenomenon. The resulting ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Energy Principle
The free energy principle is a mathematical principle in biophysics and cognitive science that provides a formal account of the representational capacities of physical systems: that is, why things that exist look as if they track properties of the systems to which they are coupled. It establishes that the dynamics of physical systems minimise a quantity known as surprisal (which is just the negative log probability of some outcome); or equivalently, its variational upper bound, called free energy. The principle is formally related to variational Bayesian methods and was originally introduced by Karl Friston as an explanation for embodied perception-action loops in neuroscience, where it is also known as active inference. The free energy principle models the behaviour of systems that are distinct from, but coupled to, another system (e.g., an embedding environment), where the degrees of freedom that implement the interface between the two systems is known as a Markov blanket. Mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Friston
Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB (born 12 July 1959) is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired statistical methods to model neuroimaging data and other random dynamical systems. He is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. In imaging neuroscience he is best known for statistical parametric mapping and dynamic causal modelling. In October 2022, he joined VERSES Inc, a California-based cognitive computing company focusing on artificial intelligence designed using the principles of active inference, as Chief Scientist. Friston is one of the most highly cited scientists of all time and in 2016 was ranked No. 1 by Semantic Scholar in the list of top 10 most influential neuroscientists. Education Karl Friston attended the Ellesmere Port Grammar School, later renamed Whitby Comprehensive, from 1970–1977 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interoception
Interoception is contemporarily defined as the collection of senses perceiving the internal state of the body. This can be both conscious and unconscious. It encompasses the brain's process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body. This is important for maintaining homeostatic conditions in the body and, potentially, facilitating self-awareness. Interoceptive signals are projected to the brain via a diversity of neural pathways, in particular from the lamina I of the spinal cord along the spinothalamic pathway and through the projections of the solitary nucleus, that allow for the sensory processing and prediction of internal bodily states. Misrepresentations of internal states, or a disconnect between the body's signals and the brain's interpretation and prediction of those signals, have b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Occipital Cortex
The occipital lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The name derives from its position at the back of the head, from the Latin ''ob'', "behind", and ''caput'', "head". The occipital lobe is the visual processing center of the mammalian brain containing most of the anatomical region of the visual cortex. The primary visual cortex is Brodmann area 17, commonly called V1 (visual one). Human V1 is located on the medial side of the occipital lobe within the calcarine sulcus; the full extent of V1 often continues onto the occipital pole. V1 is often also called striate cortex because it can be identified by a large stripe of myelin, the Stria of Gennari. Visually driven regions outside V1 are called extrastriate cortex. There are many extrastriate regions, and these are specialized for different visual tasks, such as visuospatial processing, color differentiation, and motion perception. Bilateral lesions of the occipital lobe can lead ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Visual Processing
Visual processing is a term that is used to refer to the brain's ability to use and interpret visual information from the world around us. The process of converting light energy into a meaningful image is a complex process that is facilitated by numerous brain structures and higher level cognitive processes. On an anatomical level, light energy first enters the eye through the cornea, where the light is bent. After passing through the cornea, light passes through the pupil and then lens of the eye, where it is bent to a greater degree and focused upon the retina. The retina is where a group of light-sensing cells, called photoreceptors are located. There are two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to dim light and cones are better able to transduce bright light. Photoreceptors connect to bipolar cells, which induce action potentials in retinal ganglion cells. These retinal ganglion cells form a bundle at the optic disc, which is a part of the optic nerve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cortical Column
A cortical column is a group of neurons forming a cylindrical structure through the cerebral cortex of the brain perpendicular to the cortical surface. The structure was first identified by Mountcastle in 1957. He later identified cortical minicolumn, minicolumns as the basic units of the neocortex which were arranged into columns. Each contains the same types of neurons, connectivity, and firing properties. Columns are also called hypercolumn, macrocolumn, functional column or sometimes cortical module,. Neurons within a minicolumn (microcolumn) encode similar features, whereas a hypercolumn "denotes a unit containing a full set of values for any given set of receptive field parameters". A cortical module is defined as either synonymous with a hypercolumn Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle, (Mountcastle) or as a tissue block of multiple overlapping hypercolumns. Cortical columns are proposed to be the canonical microcircuits for predictive coding, in which the process of cognition is impl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cerebral Cortex
The cerebral cortex, also known as the cerebral mantle, is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals. The cerebral cortex mostly consists of the six-layered neocortex, with just 10% consisting of allocortex. It is separated into two cortices, by the longitudinal fissure that divides the cerebrum into the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres are joined beneath the cortex by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system. It plays a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness. The cerebral cortex is part of the brain responsible for cognition. In most mammals, apart from small mammals that have small brains, the cerebral cortex is folded, providing a greater surface area in the confined volume of the cranium. Apart from minimising brain and cranial volume, cortical folding is crucial for the brain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Active Inference
The free energy principle is a mathematical principle in biophysics and cognitive science that provides a formal account of the representational capacities of physical systems: that is, why things that exist look as if they track properties of the systems to which they are coupled. It establishes that the dynamics of physical systems minimise a quantity known as surprisal (which is just the negative log probability of some outcome); or equivalently, its variational upper bound, called free energy. The principle is formally related to variational Bayesian methods and was originally introduced by Karl Friston as an explanation for embodied perception-action loops in neuroscience, where it is also known as active inference. The free energy principle models the behaviour of systems that are distinct from, but coupled to, another system (e.g., an embedding environment), where the degrees of freedom that implement the interface between the two systems is known as a Markov blanket. More ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reticular Activating System
The reticular formation is a set of interconnected nuclei that are located throughout the brainstem. It is not anatomically well defined, because it includes neurons located in different parts of the brain. The neurons of the reticular formation make up a complex set of networks in the core of the brainstem that extend from the upper part of the midbrain to the lower part of the medulla oblongata. The reticular formation includes ascending pathways to the cortex in the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) and descending pathways to the spinal cord via the reticulospinal tracts. Neurons of the reticular formation, particularly those of the ascending reticular activating system, play a crucial role in maintaining behavioral arousal and consciousness. The overall functions of the reticular formation are modulatory and premotor, involving somatic motor control, cardiovascular control, pain modulation, sleep and consciousness, and habituation. The modulatory functions are p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
