Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a connectionist model of human reasoning that uses temporal relations between node firing. Temporal synchrony is used for representing variable binding and concepts. Temporal succession serves to represent rules by linking antecedent to consequent parts of the rule. The number of successive synchronies is affected by two well-known neurobiological parameters, the frequency of neural rythmic activity and the precision of neural synchronization. Reasoning is predicted to be constrained by these variables. An experiment manipulating the amount of successive synchronies is presented. Experimental results would seem to confirm the predictions.