Similarity of Cortical Activity Patterns Predicts Generalization Behavior

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2013 Oct 23

PMID 24147140

Citations 14

Authors

Crystal T Engineer

Claudia A Perez

Ryan S Carraway

Kevin Q Chang

Jarod L Roland

Andrew M Sloan

Michael P Kilgard

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Humans and animals readily generalize previously learned knowledge to new situations. Determining similarity is critical for assigning category membership to a novel stimulus. We tested the hypothesis that category membership is initially encoded by the similarity of the activity pattern evoked by a novel stimulus to the patterns from known categories. We provide behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that activity patterns in primary auditory cortex contain sufficient information to explain behavioral categorization of novel speech sounds by rats. Our results suggest that category membership might be encoded by the similarity of the activity pattern evoked by a novel speech sound to the patterns evoked by known sounds. Categorization based on featureless pattern matching may represent a general neural mechanism for ensuring accurate generalization across sensory and cognitive systems.

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