Department of Vision & Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences, an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Meibergdreef 47, 1105 BA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2010 Feb;14(2):64-71. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.11.005. Epub 2010 Jan 8.
How does the brain learn those visual features that are relevant for behavior? In this article, we focus on two factors that guide plasticity of visual representations. First, reinforcers cause the global release of diffusive neuromodulatory signals that gate plasticity. Second, attentional feedback signals highlight the chain of neurons between sensory and motor cortex responsible for the selected action. We here propose that the attentional feedback signals guide learning by suppressing plasticity of irrelevant features while permitting the learning of relevant ones. By hypothesizing that sensory signals that are too weak to be perceived can escape from this inhibitory feedback, we bring attentional learning theories and theories that emphasized the importance of neuromodulatory signals into a single, unified framework.
大脑如何学习那些与行为相关的视觉特征？在本文中，我们关注指导视觉表示可塑性的两个因素。首先，强化物导致扩散神经调质信号的全局释放，从而控制可塑性。其次，注意力反馈信号突出了感觉皮层和运动皮层之间负责所选动作的神经元链。我们在这里提出，注意力反馈信号通过抑制不相关特征的可塑性，同时允许相关特征的学习，从而指导学习。通过假设太弱而无法被感知的感觉信号可以逃避这种抑制性反馈，我们将注意力学习理论和强调神经调质信号重要性的理论纳入一个单一的、统一的框架。
