Psychology, Neurobiology and Modeling: The Science of Hebbian Reverberations

Psychology, Neurobiology and Modeling: The Science of Hebbian Reverberations

This chapter discusses introspective considerations for the necessity of having attractors, which neuropsychology has termed as reverberations. There exist experimental evidences for reverberations and attractors exist and are observable in neurophysiology. Attractors that are observed neurophysiologically, which appear to be required for mental processing, are very informative both for describing the functioning of the brain and for measuring information about computation processes. There are other phenomena in cognitive psychology whose interpretation in terms of correlated attractors is quite simple. For example, there is a well known phenomenon called false alarm in which subjects are shown a set of objects and then a sublist is defined. Patterns are shown very quickly, at random, and the subject has to respond after each presentation whether the stimulus belongs to the sublist. If the pattern shown is correlated with one belonging to the sublist, then the number of errors grows. In attractor language, it happens because each one of the patterns carries information of the fact that it was seen very often in temporal proximity to a pattern that belongs to the sublist.