A complementary role of intracortical inhibition in age-related tactile degradation and its remodelling in humans

Many attempts are currently underway to restore age-related degraded perception, however, the link between restored perception and remodeled brain function remains elusive. To understand remodeling of age-related cortical reorganization we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with assessments of tactile acuity, perceptual learning, and computational modeling. We show that aging leads to tactile degradation parallel to enhanced activity in somatosensory cortex. Using a neural field model we reconciled the empirical age-effects by weakening of cortical lateral inhibition. Using perceptual learning, we were able to partially restore tactile acuity, which however was not accompanied by the expected attenuation of cortical activity, but by a further enhancement. The neural field model reproduced these learning effects solely through a weakening of the amplitude of inhibition. These findings suggest that the restoration of age-related degraded tactile acuity on the cortical level is not achieved by re-strengthening lateral inhibition but by further weakening intracortical inhibition

When Artificial Intelligence and Computational Neuroscience Meet

International audienceComputational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence are both aiming at building machines and softwares capable of intelligent behavior. They are consequently prone to interactions, even if the latter is not necessarily interested in understanding how cognition emerges from the brain substrate. In this chapter, we enumerate, describe and discuss the most important fields of interactions. Some are methodological and are concerned with information representation, processing and learning. At the functional level, the focus is set on major cognitive functions like perception, navigation, decision making and language. Among the salient characteristics of the critical contributions of Computational Neuroscience to the development of intelligent systems, its systemic view of the cerebral functioning is particularly precious to model highly multimodal cognitive functions like decision makin