Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Johansson showed that people can recognize hunicin gaits from brief presentation of only a few moving dots. A recently constructed connectionist model, MARS , is the first program of any type to model this phenomenon. One of the key ideais is that an associ- ation is formed between visual actions and spatial lo- cations. Simulations show that in MARS the cissocia- tion mechanism is necessary for reliable recognition of multiple actions, and that the action-recognition pro- cess and the location association process ax;t in con- sort to arrive at a stable interpretation of the image sequence. Association between location and action is performed in a spatiotopic network of cells that spe- cialize in detecting temporal synchrony between vi- sual events in the scene and predictions generated by active models of actions held in memory . The model suggests that such a mechanism may be used to build and maintain associations acquired sequentially.