The Hierarchical Organisation of Cortical and Basal-Ganglia Systems: A Computationally-Informed Review and Integrated Hypothesis

By Gianluca Baldassarre, Daniele Caligiore, Francesco Mannella. 2013

17 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To suitably adapt to the challenges posed by reproduction and survival, animals need to learn to select when to perform different behaviours, to have internal criteria for guiding these learning processes, and to perform behaviours efficiently once selected. To implement these processes, their brains must be organised in a suitable hierarchical fashion. Here we briefly review two types of neural/behavioural/computational literatures, focussed, respectively, on cortex and on sub-cortical areas, and highlight their important limitations. Then we review two computational modelling works of the authors that exemplify the problems, brain areas, experiments, main concepts, and limitations of the two research threads. Finally we propose a theoretical integration of the two views, showing how this allows us to solve most of the problems found by the two accounts if taken in isolation. The overall picture that emerges is that the cortical and the basal ganglia systems form two highly-organised hierarchical systems working in close synergy and jointly solving all the challenges of choice, selection, and implementation needed to acquire and express adaptive behaviour.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology, Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): “Thus, the cortex is organised along multiple cortical pathways running from sensors to actuators (Baldassarre et al., 2013) and “intercepted” by the basal ganglia selective processes in their last part closer to action (Mannella & Baldassarre, 2015).”
Selection of cortical dynamics for motor behaviour by the basal ganglia (2015, background): “…to perform, originating from the environment and from internal states, reaches the motor cortex indirectly through the dorsal neural pathway, involving parietal and premotor cortex, and through the ventral pathway, involving the temporal, prefrontal and premotor cortex (Baldassarre et al. 2013).”