Cognition
Research into neural mechanisms behind many cognitive phenomena, including working memory, syntactic generalization, structured representations, associative memory, and more.
We have done work on working memory that some may consider cognitive, but we are now more focused on methods for building cognitive architectures in general. The architecture we have developed is called the Semantic Pointer Architecture
This is a novel cognitive architecture that combines our interest in VSAs with the vector processing capabilities of the NEF. Early work focused on doing inferential symbolic processing in a biologically plausible, spiking neural network. This work demonstrates syntactic generalization (generalizing over syntactic structure despite sensitivity to semantic information) -- what has often be called a hallmark of cognitive function.
We have now extended this work significantly in two ways: 1. we are addressing issues of scalability (which seems to be the major strength of not adopting a classical architecture); and 2. we are incorporating a biologically plausible clean-up memory (a kind of associative memory).
Details of our work on cognitive modelling are forthcoming in a currently submitted paper. For now you can read this summary, which was written for a grant application to NSERC.
You can also watch some demonstration videos related to this work, including convolution/binding in neurons, a neural production system, and high-dimensional representation