Aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring the new mall may seem unproductive, but new research from HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus suggests it could play an important role in how our brains learn.
By simultaneously recording the activity of tens of thousands of neurons, a team of scientists from the Pachitariu and Stringer labs discovered that learning may occur even when there are no specific tasks or goals involved.
Published in Nature, the new research finds that as animals explore their environment, neurons in the visual cortex—the brain area responsible for processing visual information —encode visual features to build an internal model of the world. This information can speed up learning when a more concrete task arises.