NATURE, NURTURE, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF FUNCTIONAL SPECIALIZATIONS - A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH

The roles assigned to nature and nurture in the acquisition of functio nal specializations have been modified in recent years due to increasi ng evidence that experience-dependent processes are more influential i n determining a brain region's functional properties than was previous ly supposed. Consequently, one may study the developmental principles that play a role in the acquisition of functional specializations. Thi s article studies the hypothesis that a combination of structure-funct ion correspondences plus the use of competition between modules leads to functional specializations. This principle has been instantiated in a family of neural network architectures referred to as ''mixtures-of -experts'' architectures. These architectures are sensitive to structu re-function relationships in the sense that they often learn to alloca te to each task a network whose structure is well matched to that task . The viewpoint advocated here represents a middle ground between nati vist and constructivist views of modularity.