A Bio-Inspired Decision-Making Memristive Circuit Based on Classical and Operant Conditioning

This work proposes a bio-inspired decision-making memristive circuit drawing on Hull’s secondary learning system. This circuit can not only mimic the decision-making initiated by secondary drive stimuli and shaped and guided by secondary reinforcers via integrating classical conditioning (CC) and operant conditioning (OC), but also consider the factors that influence decision-making, such as demand states, incentive motivation, and habit strength. These bionic functions have not yet been implemented by existing memristive circuits. Our circuit primarily includes CC module, drive regulation module, habit memory module, incentive generation module, and winner-takes-all module, which is designed through a modular hierarchical circuit design method. Memristors play a core role in our circuit and enable the circuit to perform brain-like online learning in an in-memory computing way, which has power and area advantages. The PSPICE-based simulations in various scenarios show that our circuit has a strong adaptive decision-making ability since more bionic features are considered. The proposed circuit can be applied to a bionic intelligent robot, enabling the robot capable of autonomous associative learning abilities to perform complex tasks such as detection and rescue. Note to Practitioners—This work is motivated by the problem of neuromorphic circuit design for bio-inspired learning and decision-making. To realize brain-like online in-situ learning in an in-memory computing way and enhance the adaptability of the circuit in dynamic environment, a memristive circuit integrating CC and OC is proposed. Referring to Hull’s secondary learning system, the proposed circuit takes into account factors that affect decision-making, such as demand states, incentive motivation, and habit strength, as well as the fact that decision-making processes can be evoked by secondary drive stimuli and shaped by secondary reinforcers, which is unaddressed by existing memristor-based works. The bionic foraging simulations in various scenarios show that our circuit can make favorable adaptive decisions based on various cues categorized by associative memories when engaging with their environment. Such a bio-inspired memristive circuit system can be applied to bionic robots or rescue detection robots through large-scale integration to achieve adaptive learning and decision-making of complex tasks with low power consumption.