Cognitive Learning & Computational Neuroscience

The speaker briefly talked about Aristotle and that he came up with the concept of contiguity. This means that when things co-occur, they would eventually result in association. This gave rise to studies that used quantitative conclusions such as the closeness of issues in terms of time, space or frequency and how these factors determine learning. In essence, the way people learn probabilistically was discussed.

The Basil Ganglia is the part of the brain that detects feedback. It is the means by which humans detect positive or negative feedback due to a given behavior. A positive feedback is caused by dopamine being fired to the Basil Ganglia when a certain action is performed. This explains how learning happens through positive affirmation and feedback.

The video also talks about the Hippocampus participating in observational or latent learning. An interesting fact about the Hippocampus is that it creates cognitive maps via Redundancy Compression and Predictive Differentiation. Compressing understanding of things that are somewhat associated and distinguishing the differentiation between similar information that needs elaboration. The Hippocampus helps in generalizations. Novelty (“Anomaly”) detection was also discussed by applying concepts learnt from the study of the Hippocampus.

Here is the video.