Abstract

Please join us for our fortnightly journal club online via zoom where two presenters will jointly present a topic together. The next topic is ‘Abstract representations of task related variables in prefrontal cortex and ANNs’ presented by Jascha Achterberg and Kris Jensen.

Zoom information: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84958321096?pwd=dFpsYnpJYWVNeHlJbEFKbW1OTzFiQT09

Neural responses in prefrontal cortex (PFC) have long been known to encode abstract concepts such as ‘task rules’ or ‘context’ in addition to lower level representations of e.g. sensory inputs using mixed selectivity. Recent experimental and computational work suggests that the representations of these task related variables are structured in a way that facilitates generalization across tasks. During this journal club, we will first discuss early evidence of abstract representations in PFC and highlight how these link to the current discussion of generalizable task models and meta-reinforcement learning. Then we will present recent work illustrating how those abstract representations support generalization across task contexts, both in the primate brain and ANNs. Finally we will consider evidence that such representations can arise in a delayed response task from the computation of a mapping between prospective inputs and their corresponding outputs during the delay in both humans and RNNs.

Key papers: Bernadi et al.: “The geometry of abstraction in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex”. Cell (2020). Ehrlich & Murray: “Geometry of neural computation unifies working memory and planning”. bioRxiv (2021).