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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience pp 1–12Cite as

Neuromorphic Cognition

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Synonyms

Neuromorphic cognitive systems; Neuromorphic electronic systems; Neuromorphic real-time behaving systems

Definition

The hallmark of cognitive behavior is the ability of an agent to select an economically advantageous action based on immediate external stimuli as well as on their longer-term context. Neuromorphic cognition refers to the cognitive abilities of systems or agents implemented in neuromorphic electronic VLSI technology whose processing architecture is similar to the distributed, asynchronous one of biological brains. Neuromorphic agents are typically real-time behaving systems composed of multiple asynchronous event-based VLSI chips that integrate networks of silicon neurons and dynamic synapses together and that are interfaced to event-based neuromorphic sensors and robotic actuators. In order to express cognitive performance, these agents require a hardware infrastructure that supports local learning and decision making, for distributed communication and for the...

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the EU ERC Grant “neuroP” (257219). Part of this work, including the one on soft WTA networks, was done in collaboration with Elisabetta Chicca. We acknowledge also the CapoCaccia and Telluride workshops on neuromorphic engineering (The CapoCaccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (http://capocaccia.ethz.ch/) and the Telluride neuromorphic cognition engineering workshop (http://www.ine-web.org)) for fruitful discussions on neuromorphic cognition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland

    Prof. Giacomo Indiveri & Prof. Dr. Rodney Douglas

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  1. Prof. Giacomo Indiveri
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  2. Prof. Dr. Rodney Douglas
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Correspondence to Giacomo Indiveri .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Ranu Jung

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Indiveri, G., Douglas, D.R. (2014). Neuromorphic Cognition. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_113-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_113-1

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