Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The connectionist/control simulation of attentional enhancement, signal maintenance, and buffering of information is described. The system implements a hybrid connectionist architecture incorporating auto-association in the hidden layer and gain control on the hidden and output layer. The structure of the model parallels major features of modular cortical structure. The attentional selection simulations show that as one channel is attenuated, the system exhibits attentional capture in which only the more intense stimulus is transmitted to higher levels. The signal maintenance simulations show that small levels of auto-associative feedback can faithfully maintain short bursts of input for extended periods of time. With high auto-associative feedback, one module can buffer information from a previous transmission while the module blocks the interference resulting from concurrent transmissions. The combination of auto-associative feedback and gain control allow extensive control of information flow in a modular connectionist architecture.