Cell Assemblies, Associative Memory and Temporal Structure in Brain Signals

In this work we discuss Hebb's old ideas about cell assemblies in the light of recent results concerning temporal structure and correlations in neural signals. We want to give a conceptual, necessarily only rough picture, how ideas about`binding by synchronisation', `synnre chains', `local and global assemblies', `short and long term memory' and`behaviour' might be integrated into a coherent model of brain functioning based on neuronal assemblies. 1 ASSEMBLIES AND ASSOCIATIVE MEMORIES 1.1 Cell Assemblies Cell assemblies have been introduced by Donald Hebb with the intention of providing a functional and at the same time structural model for cortical processes and neuronal representations of external events (Hebb, 1949). According to Hebb's ideas, stimuli, objects, things, but also more abstract entities like concepts, con-textual relations, ideas, and so on are thought of being represented in the brain by simultaneous activation of large groups of neurons, which are connected by relatively numerous and/or strong mutual excitatory synapses. Single neurons may belong to many diierent cell assemblies; the determinant of an assembly is the connectivity structure between cells that deenes, which cells lend support to each others ring and hence have a higher probability to become coactivated in a reliable manner in response to diierent versions of the same stimulus: if an external stimulus excites a suuciently large subset of cells of an assembly, then the whole assembly canìgnite' or``re', because recurrent activity, distributed via the speciic mutual connections,

[1]  Thomas Wennekers,et al.  Controlling the Speed of Synnre Chains , 1996 .

[2]  Andrea Bibbig,et al.  Hippocampal Two-stage Learning and Memory Consolidation , 1996 .

[3]  Moshe Abeles,et al.  Corticonics: Neural Circuits of Cerebral Cortex , 1991 .

[4]  J. Gibbon,et al.  Timing and time perception. , 1984, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[5]  J. Eccles,et al.  The physiology of imagination. , 1958, Scientific American.

[6]  W. Little.  The existence of persistent states in the brain , 1974 .

[7]  Pieter R. Roelfsema,et al.  How Precise is Neuronal Synchronization? , 1995, Neural Computation.

[8]  Christoph von der Malsburg,et al.  The Correlation Theory of Brain Function , 1994 .

[9]  R. Stein.  Some models of neuronal variability. , 1967, Biophysical journal.

[10]  W. Singer,et al.  Relation between oscillatory activity and long-range synchronization in cat visual cortex. , 1995, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[11]  W Singer,et al.  Visual feature integration and the temporal correlation hypothesis. , 1995, Annual review of neuroscience.

[12]  J. Szentágothai,et al.  Brain Research , 2009, Experimental Neurology.

[13]  V. Braitenberg.  Cell Assemblies in the Cerebral Cortex , 1978 .

[14]  Prof. Dr. Valentino Braitenberg,et al.  Anatomy of the Cortex , 1991, Studies of Brain Function.

[15]  G. Palm,et al.  Cell assemblies, coherence, and corticohippocampal interplay , 1993, Hippocampus.

[16]  Wulfram Gerstner,et al.  Associative memory in a network of ‘spiking’ neurons , 1992 .

[17]  G. Micheletti.  The Prefrontal Cortex. Anatomy, Physiology and Neuropsychology of the Frontal Lobe, Fuster J.M.. Raven Press, New York (1989) , 1989 .

[18]  E. Vaadia,et al.  Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. , 1993, Journal of neurophysiology.

[19]  Günther Palm,et al.  Iterative retrieval of sparsely coded associative memory patterns , 1996, Neural Networks.

[20]  Günther Palm,et al.  A neural network model of the cortico-hippocampal interplay and the representation of contexts , 1995, Behavioural Brain Research.

[21]  D. Contreras,et al.  Synchronization of fast (30-40 Hz) spontaneous cortical rhythms during brain activation , 1996, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[22]  Alessandro E. P. Villa,et al.  Evidence for spatiotemporal firing patterns within the auditory thalamus of the cat , 1990, Brain Research.

[23]  W. Pitts,et al.  A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943) , 2021, Ideas That Created the Future.

[24]  Bernard L. Strehler,et al.  Time structure and stimulus dependence of precisely replicating patterns present in monkey cortical neuronal spike trains , 1987, Brain Research.

[25]  Y. Miyashita,et al.  Neuronal correlate of pictorial short-term memory in the primate temporal cortexYasushi Miyashita , 1988, Nature.

[26]  Wayne A. Wickelgran.  Context-sensitive coding, associative memory, and serial order in (speech) behavior. , 1969 .

[27]  W A Wickelgren,et al.  Webs, cell assemblies, and chunking in neural nets: introduction. , 1999, Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale.

[28]  E. Bienenstock.  A model of neocortex , 1995 .

[29]  Dr. Robert Miller.  Cortico-Hippocampal Interplay and the Representation of Contexts in the Brain , 1991, Studies of Brain Function.

[30]  A. Damasio.  Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition , 1989, Cognition.

[31]  Abbott,et al.  Asynchronous states in networks of pulse-coupled oscillators. , 1993, Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics.

[32]  Jean,et al.  The Computer and the Brain , 1989, Annals of the History of Computing.

[33]  Wolfgang Klimesch,et al.  The Structure of Long-term Memory: A Connectivity Model of Semantic Processing , 1996 .

[34]  H. C. LONGUET-HIGGINS,et al.  Non-Holographic Associative Memory , 1969, Nature.

[35]  J. Knott.  The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory , 1951 .

[36]  J. Fuster,et al.  Inferotemporal neurons distinguish and retain behaviorally relevant features of visual stimuli. , 1981, Science.

[37]  Günther Palm,et al.  A neural network model of the cortico-hippocampal interplay: contexts and generalization , 1995, Proceedings First International Symposium on Intelligence in Neural and Biological Systems. INBS'95.

[38]  Günther Palm,et al.  Bidirectional completion of cell assemblies in the cortex , 1998 .

[39]  Thomas Wennekers,et al.  On the relation between neural modelling and experimental neuroscience , 1997 .

[40]  Günther Palm,et al.  Iterative Retrieval In Associative Memories By Threshold Control Of Different Neural Models , 1995 .

[41]  A Aertsen,et al.  Propagation of synchronous spiking activity in feedforward neural networks , 1996, Journal of Physiology-Paris.

[42]  Thomas Wennekers.  Synchronisation und Assoziation in neuronalen Netzen , 1999 .

[43]  Frank Pasemann,et al.  SYNCHRONOUS CHAOS IN HIGH-DIMENSIONAL MODULAR NEURAL NETWORKS , 1996 .

[44]  Walter J. Freeman,et al.  The Hebbian paradigm reintegrated: Local reverberations as internal representations , 1995, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[45]  W. A. Wickelgren.  Human Learning and Memory , 1981 .

[46]  W. Singer,et al.  Stimulus-dependent synchronization of neuronal responses in the visual cortex of the awake macaque monkey , 1996, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[47]  Gèunther Palm,et al.  Neural Assemblies: An Alternative Approach to Artificial Intelligence , 1982 .