Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Shastri and Ajjanagadde have proposed a biologically plausible connectionist rule-based reasoning system (hereafter referred to as a knowledge base, or K B ) , that represents a dynamic binding as the simultaneous, or in-phase, activity of the appropriate units [Shastri & Ajjanagadde 199'" "Hie work presented in this paper continues this effort at proviang a computational account of rapid, common-sense reasoning. The Dynamic Fact Communication Mechanism (DFCM) is a biologically plausible connectionist interface mechanism that extracts a temporally-encoded fact (i.e. a collection of dynamically-encoded bindings) from a source K B and incorporates the fact into a destination K B in a manner consistent with the knowledge already represented in the latter. By continually interpreting source K B activity in terms of target K B activity, D F C M is able to transfer facts between distinct KBs on the same time scale needed to perform a single rule application within a single KB. Thus, D F C M allows the benefits of decomposing a phase-based reasoning system into multiple KBs, each wi3» its own distinct phase structure, while rendering the inter-module communications costs negligible. A simple modification to D F C M allows the unit of transfer to be groups of facts. Finally, the number of units that compose DFCM is linear in the size of the K B .