By Giovanni Petri, Sebastian Musslick, Biswadip Dey, Kayhan Özcimder, David Turner, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Theodore L. Willke & Jonathan D. Cohen

The ability to learn new tasks and generalize to others is a remarkable characteristic of both human brains and recent artificial intelligence systems. The ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously is also a key characteristic of parallel architectures, as is evident in the human brain and exploited in traditional parallel architectures. Here we show that these two characteristics reflect a fundamental tradeoff between interactive parallelism, which supports learning and generalization, and independent parallelism, which supports processing efficiency through concurrent multitasking. Although the maximum number of possible parallel tasks grows linearly with network size, under realistic scenarios their expected number grows sublinearly. Hence, even modest reliance on shared representations, which support learning and generalization, constrains the number of parallel tasks. This has profound consequences for understanding the human brain’s mix of sequential and parallel capabilities, as well as for the development of artificial intelligence systems that can optimally manage the tradeoff between learning and processing efficiency.

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Read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-021-01170-x

I started working as a research software engineer for the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) in May 2017. At the end of my first week I received an email from Professor Mala Murthy and post-doc David Deutsch of the MurthyLab, asking if I would be interested in working on a project involving a “virtual reality environment for neural recording experiments”. The kid in me got very excited at the prospect of making video games. At the time I did not know the project was to develop a virtual reality simulation for flies!

Virtual reality experiments have a long history in neuroscience . They allow researchers to restrict the movement of animal subjects so that they can use advanced microscopy to image their brains in “naturalistic” environments. In the Murthy lab’s VR setup, the fly is fixed to the objective of a two photon microscope and suspended above a small sphere floating on a column of air. This small sphere is used as a sort of omni-directional treadmill. While the fly cannot actually move, it can move its legs, which in turn move the freely rotating sphere. The movement of the sphere is tracked with computer vision algorithms and thus a fictive path for the fly in a virtual world can be reconstructed. This setup allows a “moving” fly’s brain to be imaged with techniques that require it to be stationary. The two photon imaging system then provides a very flexible and powerful tool for studying changes in the fly’s brain activity over time of the experiment. Different spatial and temporal resolutions are available depending on the needs of the experimenter.