Work

Context sensitive association

01 Nov 2008, 03:47 PM

Lack of 'labeled arcs' (or definition of the type of relationship between two concepts in memory) in simulated memories is a problem. It is somewhat easy to encode two concepts in CAs and associate them. But what kind of association? How to define the type? Shouldn't a definition somehow be formed implicitly?

For instance, imagine a wooden table and a chair in a room. We perceive many kinds of association when looking at them.

They are both pieces of furniture.
They are both made out of wood.
They are placed near to each other.
They are both in the same room.
and so on..

Inspired by the famous Pavlov’s dog experiment, I devised an experiment (called the Psuedo-Pavlov experiment) to simulate, dare I say, classical conditioning / association.

A neural network was trained with the patterns food, hungry, not hungry, salivate, lie down.

During the learning phase, hunger was repeatedly presented with food and salivate, invoked (Ofcourse, we don't have to force a dog to salivate when its hungry and sees food, in real life).

Again, not hungry was repeatedly presented with food and lie down invoked (assuming that a dog food lie down inspite of the presence of food, when it's not hungry).

In the testing phase, when food was presented in the context hungry, the resultant activation was salivate (obviously) and when the same pattern food was presented with not hungry, the result activation was lie down.

This experiment cannot be compared to Pavlov's dog by any stretch (no, not because of the absence of bells) and does not have any resemblance except for the doog-food-salivate part, but it was fun and I got to witness cell assembly association.