Encinitas 2023 2_8 marilu chiofalo 1080p

SPINTRONICS IN NEUROSCIENCE
presented at the Summer Symposium:
Neuroscience Needs a Revolution to Understand Consciousness
hosted by California Institute for Human Science and the
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
August 18-20, 2023 Encinitas, California

Quantum spin models for numerosity perception
Jorge Yago Malo1, Marco Cicchini2, Simone Ausilio1, Vittoria Stanzione1, Concetta Morrone3, Marilu Chiofalo1
1Department of Physics Enrico Fermi & INFN University of Pisa, Pisa, PI, Italy. 2Institute of Neuroscience CNR-Pisa and PisaVisionLab, Pisa, PI, Italy. 3Department of Translational Research and of New Surgical and Medical Technologies University of Pisa and PisaVisionLab, Pisa, PI, Italy

Categories by Discipline
4.0 Physical and Biological Sciences
Primary Topic Area - TSC Taxonomy
[04.02]........Quantum field approaches

Abstract
Humans share with animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates, the capacity to sense the number of items in their environment already at birth. The pervasiveness of this skill across the animal kingdom suggests that it should emerge in very simple populations of neurons. Current modelling literature, however, has struggled to provide a simple architecture carrying out this task, with most proposals suggesting the emergence of number sense in multi-layered complex neural networks, and typically requiring supervised learning. Simple accumulator models fail to predict Weber’s Law, a common trait of human and animal numerosity processing challenging to be simulated, stating that the only about 15% error-rate is proportional to the number of perceived items (up to 200), while the items uncertainty is Poissonian. In a quantum and neuro-science truly interdisciplinary research, we found that an open quantum spin network, mapping a neural system and equipped with all-to-all connectivity, can simulate the human sense of number as a global dynamical property. The numerosity is encoded in the spectrum after stimulation with a number of transient signals occurring in a random or orderly temporal sequence. We use the quantum-like paradigm combined with a simulational approach borrowed from the theory and methods of open quantum systems out of equilibrium, to describe information processing in neural systems. Our method is able to capture many of the perceptual characteristics of numerosity in such systems. The frequency components of the magnetization spectra at harmonics of the system’s tunneling frequency increase with the number of stimuli presented. The amplitude decoding of each spectrum, performed with an ideal-observer model, reveals that the system follows Weber’s law. This contrasts with the well-known failure to reproduce Weber’s law with linear system or accumulators models. In the final part of this contribution, we present a first extensive study of the network connectivity conditions under which the counting capability is preserved, and discuss the perspectives of this promising approach to describe other perceptual phenomena connected with time and space.

Keywords
Open quantum systems, Quantum networks, Quantum simulations and tensor networks. (Quantum) information processing, Neural networks, Psychophysics, Sensory perception, Space time and number perception.

Видео Encinitas 2023 2_8 marilu chiofalo 1080p канала The Science of Consciousness TSC Conferences