Paper ID: 2409.13669

A Spacetime Perspective on Dynamical Computation in Neural Information Processing Systems

T. Anderson Keller, Lyle Muller, Terrence J. Sejnowski, Max Welling

There is now substantial evidence for traveling waves and other structured spatiotemporal recurrent neural dynamics in cortical structures; but these observations have typically been difficult to reconcile with notions of topographically organized selectivity and feedforward receptive fields. We introduce a new 'spacetime' perspective on neural computation in which structured selectivity and dynamics are not contradictory but instead are complimentary. We show that spatiotemporal dynamics may be a mechanism by which natural neural systems encode approximate visual, temporal, and abstract symmetries of the world as conserved quantities, thereby enabling improved generalization and long-term working memory.

Submitted: Sep 20, 2024