Symposium: Brains, Minds and Machines – Gabriel Kreiman

The Roles of Recurrent and Feedback Computations in Cortex

There are abundant recurrent connections throughout the brain, yet their functional roles remain poorly understood and these connections are notoriously absent in the successful body of work on deep feed-forward architectures. In this talk, I will take inspiration from neurobiology to suggest possible computations that could be instantiated by recurrent connections. As a paradigmatic example, we will consider the problem of pattern completion, whereby we are able to extrapolate and make inferences from partial information. Following Marr’s three-level description of visual processing, we will present behavioral, physiological and computational evidence demonstrating how recurrent connections can help solve the problem of pattern completion.