A NEURAL SAMPLING THEORY (NST) OF LEARNING AND MEMORY MECHANISMS

The purpose of the Neural Sampling Theory (NST) is to propose a plausi ble neurobiological explanation for some general properties of learnin g and memory (LM) phenomena, based on the parallelism and redundancy o f the nervous system organization; on the psychological side, the NST is inspired by the Stimulus Sampling and Encoding Variability theories . The sampling process which is its core, is not purely random; it dep ends on temporal and intensity factors. The NST may be implemented at different levels of the nervous system: synapse, neuron: assembly of n eurons. Moreover, it may be incorporated in other formal models and im prove their degree of neural realism. For instance it allows to give a more realistic representation of the connection weight in the connect ionist models and of the noisy character of the nervous system. (C) 19 97 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.