Neural and robotic correlates of predictive coding and selective attention

无论是人类抓球，狗在飞盘上跳跃，还是蜻蜓在群中捕食，无论大小大脑都进化出了将注意力集中在一个移动目标上的能力，即使有干扰物存在。这个项目旨在通过记录蜻蜓神经元的活动来研究大脑如何解决这个具有挑战性的问题，蜻蜓神经元有选择地关注一个目标，而忽略其他目标。该项目旨在研究期望和注意力是如何在大脑中编码的，并将使用从这种神经元处理中获得灵感的计算模型来构建一个自主机器人。能够在视觉上感知自然环境中的目标并与之互动的机器人在健康、监视和国防方面有应用。

Whether a human catching a ball, a dog leaping at a frisbee or a dragonfly hunting prey amidst a swarm, brains both large and small have evolved the ability to focus attention on one moving target, even in the presence of distracters. This project aims to investigate how brains solve this challenging problem by recording the activity of dragonfly neurons that selectively attend to one target whilst ignoring others. The project aims to examine how expectation and attention are encoded in the brain and will build an autonomous robot using computational models bio-inspired from this neuronal processing. Robots capable of visually perceiving and interacting with targets in natural environments have applications in health, surveillance and defence.