Johansson showed that people can recognize hunicin
gaits from brief presentation of only a few moving
dots. A recently constructed connectionist model,
MARS , is the first program of any type to model this
phenomenon. One of the key ideais is that an associ-
ation is formed between visual actions and spatial lo-
cations. Simulations show that in MARS the cissocia-
tion mechanism is necessary for reliable recognition of
multiple actions, and that the action-recognition pro-
cess and the location association process ax;t in con-
sort to arrive at a stable interpretation of the image
sequence. Association between location and action is
performed in a spatiotopic network of cells that spe-
cialize in detecting temporal synchrony between vi-
sual events in the scene and predictions generated by
active models of actions held in memory . The model
suggests that such a mechanism may be used to build
and maintain associations acquired sequentially.