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Short-term plasticity as cause-effect hypothesis testing in distal reward learning

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-10-15, 09:07 authored by Andrea SoltoggioAndrea Soltoggio
Asynchrony, overlaps and delays in sensory-motor signals introduce ambiguity as to which stimuli, actions, and rewards are causally related. Only the repetition of reward episodes helps distinguish true cause-effect relationships from coincidental occurrences. In the model proposed here, a novel plasticity rule employs short and long-term changes to evaluate hypotheses on cause-effect relationships. Transient weights represent hypotheses that are consolidated in long-term memory only when they consistently predict or cause future rewards. The main objective of the model is to preserve existing network topologies when learning with ambiguous information flows. Learning is also improved by biasing the exploration of the stimulus-response space towards actions that in the past occurred before rewards. The model indicates under which conditions beliefs can be consolidated in long-term memory, it suggests a solution to the plasticity-stability dilemma, and proposes an interpretation of the role of short-term plasticity.

Funding

European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013, Challenge 2 Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics under Grant Agreement No. 248311-AMARSi

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

Biological Cybernetics

Volume

109

Issue

1

Pages

75 - 94

Citation

SOLTOGGIO, A., 2015. Short-term plasticity as cause-effect hypothesis testing in distal reward learning. Biological Cybernetics, 109 (1), pp.75-94.

Publisher

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-08-06

Publication date

2014-09-05

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Biological Cybernetics. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/

ISSN

0340-1200

eISSN

1432-0770

Language

  • en