Neural circuits that grow while working: trained at just three developmental snapshots, a controller keeps visuomotor behavior at untrained ages
A recurrent neural controller must keep behaving while neurons are born, move, and change their intrinsic time constants during development; controllers optimized only on the initial or the mature substrate generally failed at other ages. The study feeds developmental time into a compact connectivity generator and optimizes the same generator at three, five, or fifteen developmental snapshots, testing it on two geometrically distinct substrates and two visuomotor tasks. Optimization at only three snapshots was often enough to keep performance high and consistent at trained and untrained ages, while the generated connectomes changed substantially with age and did not converge on a single sparsity or weight trajectory.