Innate development of cognitive functions and motor programs by chemoaffinity

Abstract

Humans and animals are equipped with a rich innate repertoire of cognitive and behavioral skills [1-3]. Yet, the developmental programs that establish the underlying neural structures are unknown. During early development, neural connectivity is shaped by molecular axon guidance and cell adhesion programs that connect neurons based on the affinity between presynaptic receptors and postsynaptic ligands [4, 5]. Here, we show how such chemoaffinity-based connectivity rules can also establish innate cognitive functions and motor programs by structuring recurrent neuronal networks prior to experience. Different networks develop depending on the statistics of receptor and ligand expression. We illustrate this mechanism in computational models of chemoaffinity-based development that establish i) continuous attractor networks for path integration [6] with a toroidal grid cell topology [7], ii) networks with an exponentially large number of discrete attractors and sequences [8] as categorical, hierarchical, or temporal priors [9, 10], and iii) networks for arbitrary innate motor trajectories. Hence, chemoaffinity may shape not only the anatomical organization of the brain but also its innate cognitive and motor functions.