Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42460404›Full record

ArticleComputational brain & behavior2025

Learning Temporal Relationships Between Symbols with Laplace Neural Manifolds.

Marc W Howard, Zahra Gh Esfahani, Bao Le, Per B Sederberg

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Computational brain & behavior, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Article
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  6. Ramping cells in the rodent medial prefrontal cortex encode time to past and future events via real Laplace transform.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Marc W HowardDepartment of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, 610 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215 USA.
Zahra Gh EsfahaniDepartment of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, 610 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215 USA.
Bao LeDepartment of Psychology, University of Virginia, 409 McCormick Road, Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA.
Per B SederbergDepartment of Psychology, University of Virginia, 409 McCormick Road, Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA.

Funding

CRCNS: Neural Representations of Time Across Scales in Natural and Artificial NetworksR01MH132171 · NIMH · BOSTON UNIVERSITY (CHARLES RIVER CAMPUS) · PI HOWARD, MARC W · 2022 to 2024
$1.3M
NIMH NIH HHS R01 MH132171
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Firing across populations of neurons in many regions of the mammalian brain maintains a temporal memory, a neural timeline of the recent past. Behavioral results demonstrate that people can both remember the past and anticipate the future over an analogous internal timeline. This paper presents a mathematical framework for building this timeline of the future. We assume that the input to the system is a time series of symbols-sparse tokenized representations of the present-in continuous time. The goal is to record pairwise temporal relationships between symbols over a wide range of time scales. We assume that the brain has access to a temporal memory in the form of the real Laplace transform. Hebbian associations with a diversity of synaptic time scales are formed between the past timeline and the present symbol. The associative memory stores the convolution between the past and the present. Knowing the temporal relationship between the past and the present allows one to infer relationships between the present and the future. With appropriate normalization, this Hebbian associative matrix can store a Laplace successor representation and a Laplace predecessor representation from which measures of temporal contingency can be evaluated. The diversity of synaptic time constants allows for the learning of non-stationary statistics as well as joint statistics between triplets of symbols. This framework synthesizes a number of recent neuroscientific findings including results from dopamine neurons in the mesolimbic forebrain.

Indexed as

ConvolutionLaplace transformPredictionTemporal memory

Identifiers

PMID42460404
PMCPMC13298686

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.