Autonomous Adaptive Brain Systems and Neuromorphic Agents

Models which embody brain design principles and mechanisms that subserve visual perception, cognition, emotion, and action have clarified how the brain can adapt in real time to changing environmental conditions. The brain’s ability to do this in a self-stabilizing fashion employs several different types of predictive mechanisms. The lack of a single such mechanism is clarified by accumulating theoretical and empirical evidence that brain specialization is governed by computationally complementary processing streams. The present talk will discuss recent progress towards explaining fundamental brain processes such as 3D vision in natural scenes; opticflow based navigation in natural scenes towards goals around obstacles and spatial navigation in the dark; object and scene learning, recognition, and search; cognitiveemotional dynamics that direct motivated attention towards valued goals; adaptive sensory-motor control circuits, such as those that coordinate predictive smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements; and planning circuits that temporarily represent sequences of events in working memory and learn sequential plans, including repeated events or actions. These competences clarify the global system-level organization as well as the local micro-circuit level organization of many brain systems, ranging from form and motion streams in the visual cortex through inferotemporal and parietal cortex, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortex; supplementary and frontal eye fields; orbitofrontal, ventrolateral, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; entorhinal and hippocampal cortex; and subcortical areas including basal ganglia, amygdala, superior colliculus, and nucleus reticularis tegmenti pontis. These model systems are being transferred as they become ready to a wide variety of large-scale applications in technology. See http://cns.bu.edu/~steve for many of these recent articles.