Optimal control theory

…novel principle for learning rooted in optimal control theory, which yields local plasticity rules for any neural dynamics which reaches an equilibri

Imagine that it’s tea time and you’d like to eat a distant cookie. The speed at which you will walk toward this cookie will be modulated by your sensitivities to the energetic cost of movement (e.g., lazy vs. energetic), to the cost of time (e.g., patient vs. impatient), and to the reward (e.g., hungry vs. sated). How these sensitivities modulate behavior and their neural implementation remain poorly understood. Here, we tackled this question by combining experimental and theoretical approaches. We developed an automated foraging task in which rats have to run back and forth on a treadmill to

…Optimal control theory provides a general framework for identifying such inputs and represents a promising computational tool for guiding experiments and interacting with va