WWN-9: Cross-domain synaptic maintenance and its application to object groups recognition

Where What Network 6 (WWN-6) has shown that its model of synaptic maintenance using neural transmitters acetylcholine (ACh) and norepinephrine (NE) enables each neuron to distinguish between neuronal input lines from its relatively stable object patch and those from irrelevant backgrounds. However, it is about only a single domain - sensory domain X. During development from conception through fetus and newborn, every brain neuron has three major domains of input, sensory X, lateral Y and motor Z. The single-domain model of WWN-6 is not directly applicable to multiple domains because different domains have very different dimension and signal variations that cannot be directly compared. We believe that cross-domain synaptic maintenance is a crucial mechanism to develop a shallow-and-deep processing hierarchy in the brain where each neuron autonomously select domains in the developing hierarchy, not necessarily directly connected to receptors in X and muscles in Z. In the new work here, we propose a biologically inspired model for cross-domain synaptic maintenance. We assume that the earlier connection guided by morphogen result in initial coarse connection, but cross-domain synaptic maintenance refine connections to enable each neuron to autonomously find its role. As concept patterns emerge in Z, neurons refine their connections, to differentiate their roles among sensory processing, motor processing, and a mixture of both. Experimentally, we show the effect of the new theory through learning of individual objects and object groups, where neurons initialized for object-group connections tend to find their receptor inputs from X are not as stable as inputs from motor Z, thus, gradually turn into "later" processing neurons - for "higher-level" object-based features and their invariances. In principle, WWN-9 tends to learn a new object group without repeating the learning of all instances of each individual object.