The branching of dendrites and axons is a key determinant of neural circuit formation. In this issue of Neuron, Kawabe et al. demonstrate that the ubiquitin ligase Nedd4 promotes the branching of developing dendrites by targeting the small G protein Rap2. In a complementary study, Drinjakovic et al. show that Nedd4 promotes the branching of developing axons by ubiquitinating a different target,...

This paper presents a method of vision-based reinforcement learning by which a robot learns to shoot a ball into a goal, and discusses several issues in applying the reinforcement learning method to a real robot with vision sensor. First, a \state-action deviation" problem is found as a form of perceptual aliasing in constructing the state and action spaces that re ect the outputs from physical...

Communication is not just the manipulation of words, but needs to decide what is communicated considering the surrounding situations and to understand the communicated signals considering how to reflect it on the actions. In this paper, aiming to the emergence of purposive and grounded communication, communication is seamlessly involved in the entire process consisted of one neural network, and...

Electrical stimulation has been delivered to the basal ganglia (BG) to treat intractable symptoms of a variety of clinical disorders. However, it is still unknown how such treatments improve behavioral symptoms. A difficulty of this problem is that artificial signals created by electrical stimulation interact with intrinsic signals before influencing behavior, thereby making it important to und...

Modern institutional economists look to pragmatism for: (1) an evolutionary philosophy of knowledge; and (2) a foundation of a theory of human nature. These two elements are combined in William James, who was both a philosopher of pragmatism and a pioneering experimental psychologist. The author shows first how William James added psychological depth to the pragmatic tradition as it was left by...

We consider the following problem: How should an observer change viewpoint in order to generate a dense image sequence of an arbitrary smooth surface so that it can be incrementally reconstructedusing the occluding contour and the epipolar parameterization? We present a collection of qualitative behaviors that, when integrated appropriately, purposefully control viewpoint based on the appearanc...

We present an approach for recovering a global surface model of an object from the deformation of the occluding contour using an active (i.e., mobile) observer able to control its motion. In particular, we consider two problems: (1) How can the observer’s viewpoint be controlled in order to generate a dense sequence of images that allows incremental reconstruction of an unknown surface, and (2)...