Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present the beginnings of a model of the human capacity to learn abstract invariants, such as square. The model is founded on four primary assumptions, which we believe to be neurally plausible and generic: Metric space, Topology, Comparison operations (subtraction, greater-than/less-than), and Extraction of vertices. The model successfully learns to discriminate simple planar quadrilaterals, and generalizes that learning across variations in viewpoint and modest variations in shape.