Essential circuits of cognition: The brain’s basic operations, architecture, and representations

Published by Richard Granger (University of California Irvine and Dartmouth College) on BrainEngineering.com

The goals of artificial intelligence have always been twofold: i) formal explanation of the mechanisms underlying human (and animal) intelligence and ii)construction of powerful intelligent artifacts based on those mechanisms. The latter engineering goal may pragmatically benefit from the former scientific one: extant face recognition systems and automated telephone operators might have been considered the best possible mechanisms were it not for our own abilities. The only reason that we know that these industrial systems can be outperformed is that humans do so. Biological systems achieve their cognitive capabilities solely through brain mechanisms: the physiological operation of anatomical circuitries. Brain circuits are circuits; that is, they can be understood in computational terms. An explosion of knowledge in neuroscience and related fields is revealing the data crucial for characterizing the layout and properties of these circuits. Click for more... (.pdf)