In the absence of sufficient cognitive stimulation, intelligence — and with it, a capacity for learning new things — tends to degrade with age. In this paper I explore a novel hypothesis: that this may be an adaptive solution, since learning is facilitated by temporarily inhibiting action selection and thus introducing temporal delays. An older animal that is not being cognitively challenged ma...

Adding synaptic modi"cation to the inhibitory interneuron in a minimal computational model of hippocampal region CA3 improves average performance of the simulations. After training on two partially overlapping sequences, simulations are tested on a sequence completion problem that can only be solved by using context dependent information. Simulations with dynamic autonomously scaling (DAS) inhi...