Non-conscious pattern learning (in humans)

Reading: How your brain detects patterns in the everyday: without conscious thought, Nature news, 25 September 2024.

This is a clever experiment: identify neurons that respond to particular images, then present the images via a hidden rule and measure the neuron's responses. It seems neurons learn to anticipate the secret pattern.

Uploaded image — Figure 1b from the paper: the hidden rule was to start from the edge of the pyramid, and the next image is a random selection from a directly linked images.

How? Possibly via a mechanism called “neuronal replay”, which I’ve not heard of before:

In the breaks between trials, the participants’ ‘face’ neurons replayed what they had learnt, cycling through the patterns on their own without being stimulated to do so.

And why? From the paper:

Arguably the main purpose of extracting the underlying structure of temporal sequences is to predict what is likely to happen next in order to choose appropriate actions and maximize reward.

ai biology