Cognition and internal representation of dynamic situations in mammals' brain

Abstract

Time is one of the most prominent dimensions that organize reality. Paradoxically, there are loads of redundant information contained within the temporal features of the natural world, and yet internal coding of time in the brain seems to be crucial for anticipating time-changing, dynamic hazards. Allocating such significant brain resources to process spatiotemporal aspects of complex environments should apparently be incompatible with survival, which requires fast and accurate responses. Nonetheless, animals make decisions under pressure and in narrow time windows. How does the brain achieve this? An effort to resolve the complexity-velocity trade-off led to a hypothesis called time compaction, which states the brain does not encode time explicitly but embeds it into space. Theoretically, time compaction can significantly simplify internal representations of the environment and hence ease the brain workload devoted to planning and decision-making. Time compaction also provides an operational framework that aims to explain how perceived and produced dynamic situations are cognitively represented, in the form of spatial predictions or compact internal representations (CIRs) that can be stored in memory and be used later on to guide behaviour and generate action. Although successfully implemented in robots, time compaction still lacked assessment of its biological soundness as an actual cognitive mechanism in the brain...