Neural knowledge assembly in humans and neural networks.

Journal: Neuron
PMID: 36898375

Abstract

Human understanding of the world can change rapidly when new information comes to light, such as when a plot twist occurs in a work of fiction. This flexible "knowledge assembly" requires few-shot reorganization of neural codes for relations among objects and events. However, existing computational theories are largely silent about how this could occur. Here, participants learned a transitive ordering among novel objects within two distinct contexts before exposure to new knowledge that revealed how they were linked. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals in dorsal frontoparietal cortical areas revealed that objects were rapidly and dramatically rearranged on the neural manifold after minimal exposure to linking information. We then adapt online stochastic gradient descent to permit similar rapid knowledge assembly in a neural network model.

Authors

  • Stephanie Nelli
    Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. stephanie.nelli@psy.ox.ac.uk.
  • Lukas Braun
    Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
  • Tsvetomira Dumbalska
    Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.
  • Andrew Saxe
    Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
  • Christopher Summerfield
    DeepMind, 5 New Street Square, London, UK; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Keywords

External Resources

Popular Topics
Recent Journals