US-United Kingdom Cooperative Science: A Theoretical Study of the Perceptual Prerequisites of Learning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award will support collaborative research between Dr. Andrew Barto, University of Massachusetts, and Professor Horace Barlow, Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge University, England. Dr. Barto will spend a six month sabbatical at the King's College Research Center at Cambridge. He will participate in the Research Center's Program on Biological Information Processing and will collaborate with Dr. Barlow on formulating and evaluating perceptual principles that are linked to the facilitation of goal-directed learning. The investigators propose to investigate how encoding schemes for sensory input, depending minimally on the specific behavior to be learned, can facilitate that learning. They will examine a variety of existing and novel coding principles with respect to their implications for goal-directed learning. They will focus particularly on the ideas being developed by Barlow on minimum entropy encoding principles. The investigators plan to compare and contrast these principles theoretically and, where need arises, via computational experiments. They will also relate their theoretical findings to data relevant to the coding principles exhibited by populations of neurons. Dr. Barto is a recognized leader in the field of real-time computational learning problems and Dr. Barlow has been for many years a preeminent researcher in brain perception. The results of this research should make an important contribution to understanding the theoretical link between biological and artificial neural networks.