PBHM Workshop: Anna Truzzi

The origin and development of intrinsic timescales in the brain

Adult humans and other mammals, integrate information on different timescales. Different brain areas have different intrinsic timescales, with sensory motor areas integrating information on short timescales and higher order areas on longer ones. Computational modeling developed by our group found that this encoding flexibility might be pivotal to human-like learning processes in infancy and so we aimed to characterise how intrinsic timescales originate and develop. Timescales could be adult-like already at birth, preceding a critical learning period, and shape learning by imposing an inductive bias. Alternatively, the hierarchy of timescales could develop in concert with the learning process and reflect the acquisition of temporal statistics in the environment. To investigate these alternatives, we compared intrinsic timescales in neonates and adults and measured their longitudinal development early in life, analysing data collected with fMRI and EEG. Intrinsic timescales already had a specific structure at birth, but different from adults. The results suggest that timescales at birth act as an inductive bias that favours learning on longer timescales and then develop with experience or maturation. This might help human infants to create more regularised representations of the input, which the computational modeling results.suggest would favour the development of abstract representations.