1402.0710v5.pdf (1.76 MB)
Short-term plasticity as cause-effect hypothesis testing in distal reward learning
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 CyberneticsVolume
109Issue
1Pages
75 - 94Citation
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 HeidelbergVersion
- 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
2014-08-06Publication date
2014-09-05Notes
This article was published in the journal, Biological Cybernetics. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ISSN
0340-1200eISSN
1432-0770Publisher version
Language
- en