Connectionists: REMINDER: World wide VVTNS series (6th season): Wednesday, December 3, 2025, at 11:00 am ET - Anna Shapiro | University of Pennsylvania

[David Hansel]

[image: VVTNS.png]
https://www.wwtns.online
<https://streaklinks.com/A9c7PbbpKY7PxB6PaAJWGD3-/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wwtns.online>
-
on twitter: wwtns at TheoreticalWide

You are cordially invited to  the lecture

Anna Schapiro

University of Pennsylvania

 on the topic of

Learning representations of specifics and generalities over time

The lecture will be held on zoom on December 3, 2025, at *11:00 am ET *

> To receive the link: https://www.wwtns.online/register-page
>

*Abstract: *There is a fundamental tension between storing discrete traces
of individual experiences, which allows recall of particular moments in our
past without interference, and extracting regularities across these
experiences, which supports generalization and prediction in similar
situations in the future. One influential proposal for how the brain
resolves this tension is that it separates the processes anatomically into
Complementary Learning Systems, with the hippocampus rapidly encoding
individual episodes and the neocortex slowly extracting regularities over
days, months, and years. But this does not explain our ability to learn and
generalize from new regularities in our environment quickly, often within
minutes. We have put forward a neural network model of the hippocampus that
suggests that the hippocampus itself may contain complementary learning
systems, with one pathway specializing in the rapid learning of
regularities and a separate pathway handling the region’s classic episodic
memory functions. This proposal has broad implications for how we rapidly
learn novel information of specific and generalized types, which we test
across statistical learning, inference, and category learning paradigms. We
also explore how this system interacts with slower-learning neocortical
memory systems, with empirical and modeling investigations into how
hippocampal replay shapes neocortical representations during sleep.
Together, the work helps us understand how structured information in our
environment is initially encoded and how it then transforms over time.

*About VVTNS : Launched as the World Wide  Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar
(WWTNS) in November 2020 and renamed in homage to Carl van Vreeswijk in
Memoriam (April 20, 2022), Speakers have the occasion to talk about
theoretical aspects of their work which cannot be discussed in a setting
where the majority of the audience consists of experimentalists. The
seminars, **held on Wednesdays at 11 am ET,**  are 45-50 min long followed
by a discussion. The talks are recorded with authorization of the speaker
and are available to everybody on our YouTube channel.*


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