Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two computational problems which are trivial for symbol-manipulating systems but which pose serious challenges to connectionist networks are the binding problem and the type-token problem. These difficulties arise because representations in connectionist networks do not automatically i) specify which features go with which object tokens, or ii^ distinguish between different tokens of the same type. Nevertheless, these processing shortcomings may constitute advantages when connectiomst networks are taken as models of human visual information processing. Perception research shows evidence not only of binding errors, for example in Treisman's illusory conjunctions (Treisman and Schmidt, 1982), but also of type-token errors, as seen in repetition blindness (Kanwisher, 1987) and other phenomena.