A Normative Theory of Forgetting: Lessons from the Fruit Fly

By Johanni Brea, Robert Urbanczik, Walter Senn. 2014

32 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent experiments revealed that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a dedicated mechanism for forgetting: blocking the G-protein Rac leads to slower and activating Rac to faster forgetting. This active form of forgetting lacks a satisfactory functional explanation. We investigated optimal decision making for an agent adapting to a stochastic environment where a stimulus may switch between being indicative of reward or punishment. Like Drosophila, an optimal agent shows forgetting with a rate that is linked to the time scale of changes in the environment. Moreover, to reduce the odds of missing future reward, an optimal agent may trade the risk of immediate pain for information gain and thus forget faster after aversive conditioning. A simple neuronal network reproduces these features. Our theory shows that forgetting in Drosophila appears as an optimal adaptive behavior in a changing environment. This is in line with the view that forgetting is adaptive rather than a consequence of limitations of the memory system.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Synaptic weight decay with selective consolidation enables fast learning without catastrophic forgetting (2019, neutral): “Instead, forgetting may itself be beneﬁcial (Brea et al., 2014).”
Continual learning with hypernetworks (2019, background): “Given the role of selective forgetting and reﬁnement of past memories in achieving intelligent behavior (Brea et al., 2014; Richards & Frankland, 2017), investigating and improving backwards transfer stands as an important direction for future research.”
Dissecting neural pathways for forgetting in Drosophila olfactory aversive memory (2015, background): “The ability to forget confers adaptive advantages to animals living in a changing environment (68, 69); for example, memory inconsistent with the current circumstance needs to be quickly removed or suppressed, which otherwise may endanger one’s survival.”
The Biology of Forgetting – A Perspective (2017, background): “Moreover, it seems intuitive that some level of active forgetting would offer increased fitness by reducing recurring and unwanted situations or unrewarded perseveration (Kraemer and Golding, 1997; Storm, 2011; Brea et al., 2014).”
Sleep facilitates memory by blocking dopamine neuron mediated forgetting (2015, unknown): “Even though forgetting is often thought of as a failure or limitation of the brain, recent studies support the view that forgetting is a biologically regulated function of the brain allowing optimal adaptability to an ever-changing environment (Berry and Davis, 2014; Berry et al., 2012; Shuai et al.”
The Persistence and Transience of Memory. (2017, background): “A handful of papers have explicitly explored the advantages of transience for memory-guided decision-making (Brea et al., 2014; Fusi et al., 2007; Hunt and Chittka, 2015; Santoro et al., 2016b).”