A Solution to the Binding Problem for Compositional Connectionism

Contents

Achieving compositional connectionism means finding a way to represent role-filler bindings in a connectionist system without sacrificing role-filler independence. Role-filler binding schemes based on varieties of conjunctive coding (the most common approach in the connectionist literature) fail to preserve role-filler independence. At the same time, dynamic binding of roles to fillers (e.g., by synchrony of firing) represents bindings without sacrificing independence, but is inadequate for storing bindings in long-term memory. An appropriate combination of dynamic binding (for representation in working memory) and conjunctive coding (for long-term storage and token formation) provides a platform for compositional connectionism, and has proven successful in simulating numerous aspects of human perception and cognition.