News Finding: Because the existing brain patterns likely reflect how the neurons are interconnected, the results suggest that the connectivity among neurons shapes learning.
Paper Finding: We recognized that this difference may have affected the monkey's ability to learn outsidemanifold perturbations.
News Context: The harder-to-learn patterns were different from any of the pre-existing patterns, whereas the easier-to-learn patterns were combinations of pre-existing brain patterns. Because the existing brain patterns likely reflect how the neurons are interconnected, the results suggest that the connectivity among neurons shapes learning. Byron M. Yu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, believes this work demonstrates the utility of BCI for basic scientific studies that will eventually impact people's lives.
Paper Context: Thus, the dimensionality of the space through which the monkey would have to search to find the perturbed control space was different for the two types of perturbed mappings; it was larger for the outsidemanifold perturbations than it was for the within-manifold perturbations. We recognized that this difference may have affected the monkey's ability to learn outsidemanifold perturbations. For monkey L, we reduced the size of the search space for the outside-manifold perturbations, thereby equalizing the size of the search space for the two perturbation types.