1 research outputs found
Role of Awareness and Universal Context in a Spiking Conscious Neural Network (SCNN): A New Perspective and Future Directions
Awareness plays a major role in human cognition and adaptive behaviour,
though mechanisms involved remain unknown. Awareness is not an objectively
established fact, therefore, despite extensive research, scientists have not
been able to fully interpret its contribution in multisensory integration and
precise neural firing, hence, questions remain: (1) How the biological neuron
integrates the incoming multisensory signals with respect to different
situations? (2) How are the roles of incoming multisensory signals defined
(selective amplification/attenuation) that help neuron(s) to originate a
precise neural firing complying with the anticipated behavioural-constraint of
the environment? (3) How are the external environment and anticipated behaviour
integrated? Recently, scientists have exploited deep learning to integrate
multimodal cues and capture context-dependent meanings. Yet, these methods
suffer from imprecise behavioural representation. In this research, we
introduce a new theory on the role of awareness and universal context that can
help answering the aforementioned crucial neuroscience questions. Specifically,
we propose a class of spiking conscious neuron in which the output depends on
three functionally distinctive integrated input variables: receptive field
(RF), local contextual field (LCF), and universal contextual field (UCF). The
RF defines the incoming ambiguous sensory signal, LCF defines the modulatory
signal coming from other parts of the brain, and UCF defines the awareness. It
is believed that the conscious neuron inherently contains enough knowledge
about the situation in which the problem is to be solved based on past learning
and reasoning and it defines the precise role of incoming multisensory signals
to originate a precise neural firing (exhibiting switch-like behaviour). It is
shown that the conscious neuron helps modelling a more precise human behaviour.Comment: Neural Computation | MIT Press Journals (In-Process