Acetylcholine neuromodulation in normal and abnormal learning and memory: vigilance control in waking, sleep, autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease

This article provides a unified mechanistic neural explanation of how learning, recognition, and cognition break down during Alzheimer's disease, medial temporal amnesia, and autism. It also clarifies whey there are often sleep disturbances during these disorders. A key mechanism is how acetylcholine modules vigilance control in cortical layer

A neuro-inspired system for online learning and recognition of parallel spike trains, based on spike latency and heterosynaptic STDP

Humans perform remarkably well in many cognitive tasks including pattern recognition. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying this process are not well understood. Nevertheless, artificial neural networks, inspired in brain circuits, have been designed and used to tackle spatio-temporal pattern recognition tasks. In this paper we present a multineuronal spike pattern detection structure able to autonomously implement online learning and recognition of parallel spike sequences (i.e., sequences of pulses belonging to different neurons/neural ensembles). The operating principle of this structure is based on two spiking/synaptic neurocomputational characteristics: spike latency, that enables neurons to fire spikes with a certain delay and heterosynaptic plasticity, that allows the own regulation of synaptic weights. From the perspective of the information representation, the structure allows mapping a spatio-temporal stimulus into a multidimensional, temporal, feature space. In this space, the parameter coordinate and the time at which a neuron fires represent one specific feature. In this sense, each feature can be considered to span a single temporal axis. We applied our proposed scheme to experimental data obtained from a motor inhibitory cognitive task. The test exhibits good classification performance, indicating the adequateness of our approach. In addition to its effectiveness, its simplicity and low computational cost suggest a large scale implementation for real time recognition applications in several areas, such as brain computer interface, personal biometrics authentication or early detection of diseases.Comment: Submitted to Frontiers in Neuroscienc

The cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory

Visual working memory allows us to temporarily maintain and manipulate visual information in order to solve a task. The study of the brain mechanisms underlying this function began more than half a century ago, with Scoville and Milner’s (1957) seminal discoveries with amnesic patients. This timely collection of papers brings together diverse perspectives on the cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory from multiple fields that have traditionally been fairly disjointed: human neuroimaging, electrophysiological, behavioural and animal lesion studies, investigating both the developing and the adult brain

Global timing: a conceptual framework to investigate the neural basis of rhythm perception in humans and non-human species

Timing cues are an essential feature of music. To understand how the brain gives rise to our experience of music we must appreciate how acoustical temporal patterns are integrated over the range of several seconds in order to extract global timing. In music perception, global timing comprises three distinct but often interacting percepts: temporal grouping, beat, and tempo. What directions may we take to further elucidate where and how the global timing of music is processed in the brain? The present perspective addresses this question and describes our current understanding of the neural basis of global timing perception