An understanding of analogy and the multiple realizability of concepts, ideas, and experience is necessary to understand cognition and the generation of behavior even at the most abstract levels. One of the most fundamental questions one can ask about a pair of neural circuits is whether they are doing the same thing or different things. Our work addresses this question by applying a model of sequential narrative analogy, Net-MATCH, to neural circuits evolved to perform a simple locomotion task. Along the way, we develop a measure of the “experience” of a neural circuit performing a behavior we call its functional trace. We find (i) that Net-MATCH reports strong analogies between some, but not all, neural circuits that perform the walking behavior, (ii) that it finds stronger analogies between circuits of the same class (as reported in previous work on this problem space) than circuits of different classes, and (iii) that it reveals strong analogies between circuits of the previously-reported BS-switch and SW-switch classes, even though these classes are of different circuit sizes. We conclude that Net-MATCH is a powerful tool for understanding the multiple realizability of behavior.

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© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2022
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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