Modeling of Brain-Like Concept Coding with Adulthood Neurogenesis in the Dentate Gyrus

Abstract

Mammalian brains respond to new concepts via a type of neural coding termed “concept coding.” During concept coding, the dentate gyrus (DG) plays a vital role in pattern separation and pattern integration of concepts because it is a brain region with substantial neurogenesis in adult mammals. Although concept coding properties of the brain have been extensively studied by experimental work, modeling of the process to guide both further experimental studies and applications such as natural language processing is scarce. To model brain-like concept coding, we built a spiking neural network inspired by adulthood neurogenesis in the DG. Our model suggests that neurogenesis may facilitate integration of closely related concepts and separation of less relevant concepts. Such pattern agrees with the previous experimental observations in classification tasks and place cells in the hippocampus. Therefore, our simulation provides insight for future experimental studies on the neural coding difference between perception and cognition. By presenting 14 contexts each containing 4 concepts to the network, we found that neural responses of the DG changed dynamically as the context repetition time increased and were eventually consistent with the category organization of humans. Thus, our work provides a new framework of word representation for the construction of brain-like knowledge map.