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SUMMARY:LCN Seminar: Forgetting in the fruit fly: bug or feature?
DTSTART:20140925T133000
DTSTAMP:20260406T102146Z
UID:c0dd39633a865652040da0d5b817761c7a98e02adfcac6aaac8d8e48
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Johanni BREA\; Department of Physiology\, University of Bern (
 homepage)\nRecent experiments revealed that the fruit fly Drosophila melan
 ogaster has a dedicated mechanism for forgetting: blocking the G-protein R
 ac leads to slower and activating Rac to faster forgetting. This active fo
 rm of forgetting lacks a satisfactory functional explanation. We investiga
 ted optimal decision making for an agent adapting to a stochastic environm
 ent where a stimulus may switch between being indicative of reward or puni
 shment. Like Drosophila\, an optimal agent shows forgetting with a rate th
 at is linked to the time scale of changes in the environment. Moreover\, t
 o reduce the odds of missing future reward\, an optimal agent may trade th
 e risk of immediate pain for information gain and thus forget faster after
  aversive conditioning. A simple neuronal network reproduces these feature
 s. Our model supports the view that forgetting is adaptive rather than a c
 onsequence of limitations of the memory system.
LOCATION:AAC132 http://plan.epfl.ch/?room=AAC132
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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