Mathematical
models describes distribution of sensory errors
Date: October 1, 2018
Source: Emory Health Sciences
Songbirds
learn to sing in a way similar to how humans learn to speak -- by listening to
their fathers and trying to duplicate the sounds. The bird's brain sends
commands to the vocal muscles to sing what it hears, and then the brain keeps
trying to adjust the command until the sound echoes the one made by the parent.
During
such trial-and-error processes of sensorimotor learning, a bird remembers not
just the best possible command, but a whole suite of possibilities, suggests a
study by scientists at Emory University. The Proceedings of the National
Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) published the study results, which include
a new mathematical model for the distribution of sensory errors in learning.
"Our
findings suggest that an animal knows that even the perfect neural command is
not going to result in the right outcome every time," says Ilya Nemenman,
an Emory professor of biophysics and senior author of the paper. "Animals,
including humans, want to explore and keep track of a range of possibilities
when learning something in order to compensate for variabilities."
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