🚀 go-pugleaf

Another  point on the whole issue of "temporal neurone"  is  that 
what's been presented so far is just pretty standard contemporary 
classical conditioning. It's been known for 30 years that  strict 
contiguity is not enough for association and I've outlined one of 
the most influential models here several times now. The Rescorla-
Wagner model of 1971 provided the first good summary of the  data 
covering "blocking", and Rescorla's earlier work in 1968  showing 
that  the CS needs to bear an "informational", more accurately  a 
contingent, temporal relationship to the UCS. Simultaneous events 
on   the  other  hand  result  in  overshadowing,  and   backward 
conditioning  very  little if anything. But a  temporal  relation 
alone  is not sufficient (as Kamin showed long ago). If one  goes 
beyond  "delay",  to "trace" conditioning, it looks  like  higher 
levels of processing such as the hippocampus is required - but as 
I've said before, this is already getting into levels of learning 
in the neuroaxis...

What  I see here in these threads is some excitement on the  part 
of  proponents  of  this work, but it seems  to  reflect  "their" 
personal  discovery  of something which a large number  of  other 
researchers have been working on in the context of small  systems 
models  (Richard Thompson's group) for several decades now.  That 
work  makes no claims to being able to build "learning  machines" 
on the other hand, just unravel some of the neuromechanics behind 
basic conditioning processes.

To be a breakthrough, a discovery has to be more than one getting 
excited   about   something  one  learns  -  to  be   a   genuine 
breakthrough, one needs to know the literature and be working  in 
the field to know what is and is not new and worthy of attention. 
How else can one ascertain whether it is indeed a breakthrough?

If you want to make any real progress on "learning machines"  you 
are  going  to  have  to come to grips with  the  issues  I  have 
discussed elsewhere, the most important of which is that most  of 
our psychological idioms, including those of learning and memory, 
are  intensional idioms, not the stuff a science  and  technology 
can or should be grounded upon (and to fully appreciate that, you 
need to know the literature).
-- 
David Longley (check end reply line #)

Longley Consulting                                                  London, UK
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