Human Replay Spontaneously Reorganizes Experience

By Yunzhe Liu, R. J. Dolan, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Timothy Edward John Behrens. 2019

402 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Knowledge abstracted from previous experiences can be transferred to aid new learning. Here, we asked whether such abstract knowledge immediately guides the replay of new experiences. We first trained participants on a rule defining an ordering of objects and then presented a novel set of objects in a scrambled order. Across two studies, we observed that representations of these novel objects were reactivated during a subsequent rest. As in rodents, human “replay” events occurred in sequences accelerated in time, compared to actual experience, and reversed their direction after a reward. Notably, replay did not simply recapitulate visual experience, but followed instead a sequence implied by learned abstract knowledge. Furthermore, each replay contained more than sensory representations of the relevant objects. A sensory code of object representations was preceded 50 ms by a code factorized into sequence position and sequence identity. We argue that this factorized representation facilitates the generalization of a previously learned structure to new objects.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “MEG studies in humans after training on tasks involving sequences with overlapping structure had activity evident of partial replays that resulted in generalization (Liu et al., 2019b).”
Embracing Change: Continual Learning in Deep Neural Networks. (2020, background): “From a biological perspective one might note that although replay has been observed in rodents and humans [68], maintaining any number of pristine observations or exemplars is unrealistic.”
The Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine: Unifying Space and Relational Memory through Generalization in the Hippocampal Formation (2019, background): “It has been suggested that abstractions and structural learning may rely on hippocampal replay (Foster andWilson, 2006; Lewis and Durrant, 2011; Liu et al., 2019) with sleep playing a crucial role in replay extracting regularities from wake experience.”