Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Axonal growth and pruning is the brains primary method of controlling the structured sparsity of its neural circuits, aswithout long distance axon branches connecting distal neurons no direct communication is possible. Further, artificialneural networks have almost entirely ignored axonal growth and pruning instead relying on implicit assumptions thatprioritize dendritic/synaptic learning above all other concerns. This project proposes a new model called the Axon Game,which allows the incorporation of biologically inspired axonal plasticity dynamics into most artificial neural networkmodels with computational efficiency. We will explore the qualities of receptive windows grown under this methodologyand discuss how they can integrate with neural network simulations.