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Cell assemblies in the cerebral cortex

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Abstract

Donald Hebb’s concept of cell assemblies is a physiology-based idea for a distributed neural representation of behaviorally relevant objects, concepts, or constellations. In the late 70s Valentino Braitenberg started the endeavor to spell out the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex is the structure where cell assemblies are formed, maintained and used, in terms of neuroanatomy (which was his main concern) and also neurophysiology. This endeavor has been carried on over the last 30 years corroborating most of his findings and interpretations. This paper summarizes the present state of cell assembly theory, realized in a network of associative memories, and of the anatomical evidence for its location in the cerebral cortex.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neural Information Processing, University of Ulm, 89069 , Ulm, Germany

    Günther Palm & Florian Hauser

  2. Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Offenbach/Main, Germany

    Andreas Knoblauch

  3. Engineering Faculty, Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, 72458 , Albstadt, Germany

    Andreas Knoblauch

  4. MPI for Biological Cybernetics, 72076 , Tübingen, Germany

    Almut Schüz

Authors
  1. Günther Palm
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  2. Andreas Knoblauch
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  3. Florian Hauser
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  4. Almut Schüz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Günther Palm.

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This article forms part of a special issue of Biological Cybernetics entitled “Structural Aspects of Biological Cybernetics: Valentino Braitenberg, Neuroanatomy, and Brain Function”

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Palm, G., Knoblauch, A., Hauser, F. et al. Cell assemblies in the cerebral cortex. Biol Cybern 108, 559–572 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-014-0596-4

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