Killam Seminar Series presents "Efficient representation, learning, and planning through abstraction: clustering cognitive spaces into submaps"

Speaker: Ila Fiete 

Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Episodic memory involves fragmenting the continuous stream of experience into discrete episodes. Not coincidentally, the hippocampus, which plays a central role in both episodic memory and spatial navigation, represents large spatial environments in a fragmented way even when explored in a continuous trajectory. In non-spatial and non-memory contexts too, humans report sudden contextual re-anchoring or re-orientation when reading garden path sentences ('Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.") or watching a movie with viewpoint changes. In this talk, I will describe a theory for the online and real-time generation of fragmented representations and contextual re-anchoring from continuous experience that resemble those obtained by principled but offline and computationally complex information-based algorithms. The resulting fragmentations closely match those observed from neural recordings in animals navigating through complex environments. I will discuss the utility of map fragmentation, as a form of state abstraction that enables representation fidelity, flexible and rapid learning through reuse of existing fragments, and many-fold improvements in the ability to plan and navigate through complex environments relative to more global representations.

Registration available here. 

Dr. Fiete is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an Associate Member of the McGovern Institute at MIT. She obtained her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, under the guidance of Sebastian Seung at MIT (co-advised by Daniel Fisher). Her postdoctoral work was at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at Santa Barbara, and at Caltech, where she was a Broad Fellow. She was subsequently on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in the Center for Learning and Memory. Ila Fiete is an HHMI Faculty Scholar. She has been a CIFAR Senior Fellow, a  McKnight Scholar, an ONR Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Searle Scholar.

Supported by the generosity of the Killam Trusts , The Neuro’s Killam Seminar series hosts outstanding guest speakers whose research is of interest to the scientific community at The Neuro and McGill University.