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This work presents an architecture that generates curiosity-driven goal-directed exploration behaviours for an image sensor of a microfarming robot. A combination of deep neural networks for offline unsupervised learning of low-dimensional features from images, and of online learning of shallow neural networks representing the inverse and forward kinematics of the system have been used. The artificial curiosity system assigns interest values to a set of pre-defined goals, and drives the exploration towards those that are expected to maximise the learning progress. We propose the integration of an episodic memory in intrinsic motivation systems to face catastrophic forgetting issues, typically experienced when performing online updates of artificial neural networks. Our results show that adopting an episodic memory system not only prevents the computational models from quickly forgetting knowledge that has been previously acquired, but also provides new avenues for modulating the balance between plasticity and stability of the models., Comment: This manuscript has been submitted for consideration for publication in the Adaptive Behaviour Sage Journal, edited by Tom Froese

Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this challenge. Indeed, Bayesian inference is a way to do optimal reasoning when only uncertain and incomplete information is available. Various perceptive, sensory-motor, and cognitive functions have been successfully modeled this way. However, the biological mechanisms allowing animals and humans to represent and to compute probability distributions are not known. It has been proposed that neurons and assemblies of neurons could be the appropriate scale to search for clues to probabilistic reasoning. In contrast, in this paper, we propose that interacting populations of macromolecules and diffusible messengers can perform probabilistic computation. This suggests that probabilistic reasoning, based on cellular signaling pathways, is a fundamental skill of living organisms available to the simplest unicellular organisms as well as the most complex brains. Cell signaling implements computation of Rational Function with Non-negative coefficients.Subjective probabilistic inference requires computation of Rational Function with Non-negative coefficients.Cell signaling implements computation of subjective probabilistic inference.

Many cognitive tasks require the ability to maintain and manipulate simultaneously several chunks of information. Numerous neurobiological observations have reported that this ability, known as the working memory, is strongly associated with the activity of the prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, during resting state, the spontaneous activity of the cortex exhibits exquisite spatiotemporal patterns sharing similar features with the ones observed during specific memory tasks. Here, we propose a computational model of the prefrontal cortex within the framework of the cell assembly theory. In that framework, dasiaa chunk of informationpsila refers to an associative memory and consists of an ensemble of neurons which activates coherently due to their strong interconnections. Our model consists of a recurrent network of cells whose dynamics results from the interplay between the membrane potential and the theta local field potential.