There is now substantial evidence for traveling waves and other structured spatiotemporal recurrent neural dynamics in cortical structures; but these observations have typically been difficult to reconcile with notions of topographically organized selectivity and feedforward receptive fields. We introduce a new 'spacetime' perspective on neural computation in which structured selectivity and dynamics are not contradictory but instead are complimentary. We show that spatiotemporal dynamics may be a mechanism by which natural neural systems encode approximate visual, temporal, and abstract symmetries of the world as conserved quantities, thereby enabling improved generalization and long-term working memory.

翻译：现有充分证据表明，皮层结构中存在行波和其他结构化的时空递归神经动力学；但这些观察结果通常难以与地形组织选择性和前馈感受野的概念相协调。我们提出了一种新的神经计算"时空"视角，其中结构化选择性与动力学并非相互矛盾，而是互为补充。我们证明，时空动力学可能是自然神经系统将世界的近似视觉、时间及抽象对称性编码为守恒量的一种机制，从而实现更好的泛化能力和长期工作记忆。