Representation and Recruitment

Introduction

In the preceding chapter we were more concerned with the neural foundations of knowledge representation and the existence of structures capable of supporting non-trivial concepts than with actual recruitment of functional circuits, which so far has been limited to the case of one-shot learning (Chapter 2). This chapter makes explicit the linkages between structural plausibility, knowledge representation and recruitment, exploring the interactions between them and ultimately demonstrating the success of our approach when applied to a number of standard benchmark problems. Later in Part I of the book, in Chapter 5, we come somewhat closer to the biological context in which the ideas were developed, recruiting sparse random networks of this type to encode the spatial relations semantics of simple images.