Robotic implementation of classical and operant conditioning within a single SNN architecture

This work presents the implementation of operant conditioning (OC) and classical conditioning (CC) with a single spiking neural network (SNN) architecture, thus suggesting that the two types of leaning may relate to the same cognitive process. Both are achieved by using a modified version of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), where the connection weight between a cue neuron and an action neuron depends on the temporal relation between their spikes and those of a reward neuron. This reward driven STDP (RD-STDP) was implemented with simple computational resources to form an electronic robot's brain, using an adaptation of the synapto-dendritic kernel adapting neuron (SKAN) model. Then, a robot driven by the new neuronal architecture was tested in a maze with changing features, successfully exhibiting CC and OC. These results and the simple computational resources used make the proposed architecture promising for very large scale time-dependent parallel data analysis, with high capacity of adaptation in a dynamic environment. Moreover, it proposes a theoretic framework to model learning by conditioning.