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Toward evolutionary and developmental intelligence
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Kenji Doya, Tadahiro TaniguchiGiven the phenomenal advances in artificial intelligence in specific domains like visual object recognition and game playing by deep learning, expectations are rising for building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can flexibly find solutions in unknown task domains. One approach to AGI is to set up a variety of tasks and design AI agents that perform well in many of them, including those the agent faces for the first time. One caveat for such an approach is that the best performing agent ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 31, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Synthetic agency: sense of agency in artificial intelligence
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Roberto Legaspi, Zhengqi He, Taro ToyoizumiThe concept of sense of agency (SoA) has garnered considerable attention in human science at least in the past two decades. Coincidentally, about two decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) research witnessed an explosion of proposed theories on agency mostly based on dynamical approaches. However, despite this early burst of enthusiasm, SoA models in AI remain limited. We review the state of AI research on SoA, seen predominantly in developmental robotics, vis-à-vis the psychology...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Planning at decision time and in the background during spatial navigation
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Giovanni Pezzulo, Francesco Donnarumma, Domenico Maisto, Ivilin StoianovPlanning is the model-based approach to solving control problems. The hallmark of planning is the endogenous generation of dynamical representations of future states, like goal locations, or state sequences, like trajectories to the goal location, using an internal model of the task. We review recent evidence of model-based planning processes and the representation of future goal states in the brain of rodents and humans engaged in spatial navigation tasks...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 26, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Predicate learning in neural systems: using oscillations to discover latent structure
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Andrea E Martin, Leonidas AA DoumasHumans learn to represent complex structures (e.g. natural language, music, mathematics) from experience with their environments. Often such structures are latent, hidden, or not encoded in statistics about sensory representations alone. Accounts of human cognition have long emphasized the importance of structured representations, yet the majority of contemporary neural networks do not learn structure from experience. Here, we describe one way that structured, functionally symbolic representa...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 26, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Colour vision helps distinguish light from material
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Frederick AA KingdomColour vision is not only useful for identifying hues but for determining the structure of the visual world. This latter use of colour vision exploits the physical relationships that exist between the pattern of colour (chromatic) and luminance variations in the natural environment. I argue that one important role for colour vision in this regard is to help distinguish material variations from variations in local light intensity, where material variations include changes in pigmentation, paint, stain and s...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 26, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Reinforcement learning: bringing together computation and cognition
This article will highlight recent research showing how bringing together the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science may benefit both. Ideas from artificial intelligence have provided helpful formal theories to account for aspects of human learning. In return, ideas from cognitive science and neuroscience can also inform artificial intelligence research with directions to make algorithms more human-like. For example, recent work shows that human learning can only be understood in the context of multiple separate, interacting memory systems, rather than as a single, complex learner. This insight is starting...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Lifelong learning and inductive bias
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Ron Amit, Ron MeirEffective learning from finite data requires assumptions about the data source, a notion referred to as inductive bias in the Machine Learning literature. A fundamental question pertains to the source of a ‘good’ inductive bias. One natural way to form such a bias is through lifelong learning, where an agent continually interacts with the world through a sequence of tasks, aiming to improve its performance on future tasks based on the tasks it has seen, and solved, so far. We review the problem of lifelon...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 22, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Cognitive bots and algorithmic humans: toward a shared understanding of social intelligence
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Kelsey R .McDonald, John M PearsonQuestions of social behavior are simultaneously among the most fundamental in neuroscience and the most challenging in artificial intelligence. Yet despite decades of work, a unified perspective from the cognitive and computational approaches to the problem has yet to emerge. Recently, however, excitement around the challenges posed to reinforcement learning by multiplayer video games, coupled with the adoption of more complex modeling strategies in social neuroscience, has broadened the inter...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 22, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Towards learning-to-learn
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Benjamin James Lansdell, Konrad Paul KordingIn good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI), humans specified systems that solved problems. Much of the recent progress in AI has come from replacing human insights by learning. These learning systems are usually built by humans. Yet there is no reason to believe that humans are particularly good at defining such systems: we may expect learning to be better if we learn it. Recent research in machine learning has started to realize the benefits of that strategy. We should th...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 19, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Color perception in natural images
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Christopher W Tyler, Joshua A SolomonThis review of color processing in natural image viewing – rather than artificial laboratory images – addresses the role of color edges. Much of the color variation in nature is a result of evolutionary processes in complex organisms that have developed eye–brain systems that use color signals for a variety of biological functions. One aspect of human color processing is the tendency to attribute the appearance of extended color fields to a process of filling-in from the differential...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Linking neural responses to behavior with information-preserving population vectors
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Tatyana O. Sharpee, John A. BerkowitzAll systems for processing signals, both artificial and within animals, must obey fundamental statistical laws for how information can be processed. We discuss here recent results using information theory that provide a blueprint for building circuits where signals can be read-out without information loss. Many properties that are necessary to build information-preserving circuits are actually observed in real neurons, at least approximately. One such property is the use of logistic nonline...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 9, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Cortical double-opponent cells and human color perception
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Robert Shapley, Valerie Nunez, James GordonHuman color perception’s dependence on the spatial pattern of color is a function of color contrast. At low color contrast, the visual system acts as a spatial integrator of color signals. Therefore, near threshold, the optimum color pattern is a large, uniformly colored region. But the system changes at high color contrast, becoming more sensitive to changes in the spatial context of color especially color boundaries with surrounding regions. We offer a mechanistic explanation of ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - May 5, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editorial overview: Creativity
Publication date: Available online 19 April 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral SciencesAuthor(s): Hikaru Takeuchi, Rex E Jung (Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - April 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Understanding microglial involvement in stress-induced mood disturbance: a modulator of vulnerability?
This article will place in context these recent developments and will place a particular focus on considering how microglia may contribute to shaping the operating environment of the CNS to foster susceptibility and resilience to psychopathology. Specifically, we will consider contributions from microglial priming, microglial modulation of synaptic plasticity, glial modulation of glutamatergic tone, and finally the role of neuroinflammatory disturbances in cerebrovascular integrity. Although much has been revealed about neuroimmune contributions to mood state and psychological health, our understanding of core mechanisms i...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - April 6, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Challenges and opportunities of a-priori and a-posteriori variability in maternal immune activation models
Publication date: August 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 28Author(s): Ulrike Weber-Stadlbauer, Urs MeyerAnimal models of maternal immune activation (MIA) are widely used as experimental tools to study neurobehavioral and molecular dysfunctions in relation to immune-mediated neurodevelopmental disorders and mental illnesses. Both planned or intended (‘a-priori variability’) and unplanned or unintended (‘a-posteriori variability’) sources of variability exist in and are relevant to these models. The design, implementation, and interpretation of MIA models, thus, require adequate time consid...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - April 6, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research