Acetylcholine in cortical inference

Acetylcholine (ACh) plays an important role in a wide variety of cognitive tasks, such as perception, selective attention, associative learning, and memory. Extensive experimental and theoretical work in tasks involving learning and memory has suggested that ACh reports on unfamiliarity and controls...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neural networks 2002-06, Vol.15 (4), p.719-730
Main Authors: Yu, Angela J., Dayan, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine - physiology
Animals
Attention
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Hidden Markov model
Humans
Markov Chains
Models, Neurological
Neuromodulation
Perception
Representational inference
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Acetylcholine (ACh) plays an important role in a wide variety of cognitive tasks, such as perception, selective attention, associative learning, and memory. Extensive experimental and theoretical work in tasks involving learning and memory has suggested that ACh reports on unfamiliarity and controls plasticity and effective network connectivity. Based on these computational and implementational insights, we develop a theory of cholinergic modulation in perceptual inference. We propose that ACh levels reflect the uncertainty associated with top-down information, and have the effect of modulating the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing in determining the appropriate neural representations for inputs. We illustrate our proposal by means of an hierarchical hidden Markov model, showing that cholinergic modulation of contextual information leads to appropriate perceptual inference.
ISSN:0893-6080
1879-2782
DOI:10.1016/S0893-6080(02)00058-8