Plasticity in the visual cortex after supervised and unsupervised training (VIDEO)
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By simultaneously recording the activity of tens of thousands of neurons, a team of scientists from the Pachitariu and Stringer labs at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus discovered that learning may occur even when there are no specific tasks or goals involved. The new research finds that as animals explore their environment, neurons in the visual cortex—the brain area responsible for processing visual information—encode visual features to build an internal model of the world. This information can speed up learning when a more concrete task arises. The new findings reveal distinct areas in the visual cortex are responsible for different types of learning: unstructured, exploration-based unsupervised learning and instructed, goal-oriented supervised learning.
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Lin Zhong/HHMI Janelia Research Campus
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