Laszlo, S., & Armstrong, B. C. (2014). Applying the dynamics of post-synaptic potentials to individual units in simulation of temporally extended ERP reading data. Brain & Language, 132, 22-27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2014.03.002
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Abstract
The parallel distributed processing (PDP) framework is built on neural-style computation, and is thus well-suited for simulating the neural implementation of cognition. However, relatively little cognitive modeling work has concerned neural measures, instead focusing on behavior. Here, we extend a PDP model of reading-related components in the event-related potential (ERP) to simulation of the N400 repetition effect. We accomplish this by incorporating the dynamics of cortical post-synaptic potentials—the source of the ERP signal—into the model. Simulations demonstrate that application of these dynamics is critical for model elicitation of repetition effects in the time and frequency domains. We conclude that by advancing a neurocomputational understanding of repetition effects, we are able to posit an interpretation of their source that is both explicitly specified and mechanistically different from the well-accepted cognitive one.
Keywords: Parallel Distributed Processing; ERPs; N400; Visual Word Recognition; Repetition Effects; Post-Synaptic Potentials; Neural Computation.
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