Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we explore the problem of dynamically computing visual relations in a connectionist system. The task of detecting equilateral triangles from clusters of points is used to test our architecture. W e argue that this is a difficult task for traditional feed-forward architectures although it is a simple task for people. Our solution implements a biologically inspired network which uses an efficient focus of attention mechanism and cluster detectors to sequentially extract the locations of the vertices.