Bio-inspired cognitive architecture of episodic memory

Abstract

Memory and learning are essential functions in human beings as they allow us to acquire and store in the brain representations of thoughts, experiences, and behaviors, which are required for problem-solving in our daily life and mainly for survival. Episodic memory is a type of memory that provides the ability to re-experience events in one’s life, and it is associated with their conscious recollection. Since episodic memory can represent our experiences about the environment, similar to a mental journey, it is desired in systems that attempt to create human-like behavior. Currently, the main problem is that state of the art proposals do not consider neuroscientific evidence like memory dynamics for forgetting or bottom-up inputs, and most of them do not consider episodic memory as a different memory but as part of general declarative memory. We consider these omissions to limit the generation of human-like behavior. In this work, we propose a bio-inspired cognitive architecture of episodic memory. Neuroscientific evidence provides us with the brain structures associated with this type of memory, the connections, and the operations these areas perform. We hypothesize that virtual entities endowed with our episodic memory cognitive architecture will plan and make decisions in a more human-like fashion. To test the capabilities of the proposal, we endowed a virtual creature with a distributed and concurrent implementation of our architecture, and it was given two tasks. The first task validated the functions of the memory independently, and in the second task, the creature used episodic memory to solve a planning problem. From the results of these experiments, we validate our proposal and show that it is possible to create a system that behaves as the human brain does.