Section: New Results

The associative loop

The prefrontal cortex is known to be involved in many high-level cognitive functions, in particular working memory. In [23], we studied to what extent a group of randomly connected units (namely an Echo State Network, ESN) can store and maintain (as output) an arbitrary real value from a streamed input, i.e. can act as a sustained working memory unit. Furthermore, we explored to what extent such an architecture can take advantage of the stored value in order to produce non-linear computations. Comparison between different architectures (with and without feedback, with and without a working memory unit) shows that an explicit memory improves the performances. This property of the model can be considered as a gated memory: a value enters the memory at the moment of the (input) trigger and is kept constant in face of incoming distractors (the continuous streamed input).