Generative AI helps to explain human memory and imagination

Recent advances in generative AI help to explain how memories enable us to learn about the world, re-live old experiences and construct totally new experiences for imagination and planning, according to a new study by UCL researchers. The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour and funded by Wellcome, uses an AI computational model - known as a generative neural network - to simulate how neural networks in the brain learn from and remember a series of events (each one represented by a simple scene). The model featured networks representing the hippocampus and neocortex, to investigate how they interact. Both parts of the brain are known to work together during memory, imagination and planning. Lead author, PhD candidate Eleanor Spens (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), said: "Recent advances in the generative networks used in AI show how information can be extracted from experience so that we can both recollect a specific experience and also flexibly imagine what new experiences might be like. " We think of remembering as imagining the past based on concepts, combining some stored details with our expectations about what might have happened. " Humans need to make predictions to survive (e.g.