Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Winner-take-all (WTA) mechanisms are an important compo-nent of many cognitive models. For example, they are oftenused to decide between multiple choices or to selectively di-rect attention. Here we compare two biologically plausible,spiking neural WTA mechanisms. We first provide a novelspiking implementation of the well-known leaky, competingaccumulator (LCA) model, by mapping the dynamics onto apopulation-level representation. We then propose a two-layerspiking independent accumulator (IA) model, and compare itsperformance against the LCA network on a variety of WTAbenchmarks. Our findings suggest that while the LCA net-work can rapidly adapt to new winners, the IA network is bet-ter suited for stable decision making in the presence of noise.