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| With mathematical models, Bochum and US researchers have simulated processes in the brain of mice and humans. Credit: RUB, Marquard |
Researchers have reproduced the brain functions of the mouse and human in the computer. Artificial intelligence could learn from this.
For a long time, the thalamus was considered a brain region that is primarily responsible for processing sensory stimuli. Current studies have increased the evidence that it is a central switch in cognitive processes. Researchers of neuroscience around Prof. Dr. Burkhard Pleger in Collaborative Research Center 874 of the Ruhr University Bochum and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) observed learning processes in the brains of mice and humans and reproduced them in mathematical models. They were able to show that the region of the mediodoral nucleus in the thalamus has a decisive share in cognitive flexibility. They report in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
A simple learning task
At the beginning of the joint work of the German and US team were experimental observations of the brain in simple learning tasks. The German team had observed the brain activity of human subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging, while the subjects had to feel two different stimuli in different sequences with their fingertips. You should then predict the next stimulus. Depending on how likely one or the other stimuli were, it was easier or more difficult to learn.
The MIT team had mice completed a very similar learning task and not only observed their brain activity, but also later reproduced it in the form of a mathematical model. "When reading the relevant work, we immediately saw the great similarity between the activation patterns in mice and humans," reports Burkhard Pleger. Based on the work of the colleagues, the two research teams jointly expanded the mathematical mouse model to include the human components. He and the US team broke new ground with the current work: "Researchers who work with mice and we who work with people first had to develop a common terminology so that we could work together," he reports.
Results are of three types interest
If the researchers then applied the mathematical model to the learning task from the experiment, the test subjects came to the same results. "The agreement was almost 90 percent and therefore very high," said Pleger. It is characteristic of the mathematical network model that the region of the mediodoral nucleus in the thalamus is in constant exchange with regions of the prefrontal cortex. "This once again proves how important the thalamus is for cognitive processes," says Burkhard Pleger. “This is of particular interest for three reasons: firstly, because cognitive flexibility is vital. On the other hand, because it is at the center of pathology for a large number of psychiatric diseases. Not least because we can also imitate what we can explain using mathematical models. This enables us to draw conclusions about how artificial intelligences could learn."
Source/Credit: Ruhr University Bochum
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