Connectionists: On Findings of Category and Other Concept Cells in the Brain: Some Theoretical Perspectives on Mental Representation

[Asim Roy]

The following article appears in Cognitive Computation. Based on neurophysiological evidence and theoretical arguments, the brain appears to be a symbolic system at the neuron level. There are good reasons to question the idea of distributed representation or population coding.

Roy, A. (2014). "On Findings of Category and Other Concept Cells in the Brain: Some Theoretical Perspectives on Mental Representation."

Here's the link to the article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-014-9307-7

Abstract.

There is substantial neurophysiological evidence from decades of single-cell studies that category and other concept cells exist in both human and animal brains. This indicates that the brain can generalize and create abstract concepts and encode and represent such abstractions using single cells. These single-cell findings cannot be accounted for and explained by the theory of distributed representation and population coding, the dominant theory in the brain sciences. In light of these findings, this paper reexamines the two contending mental representational schemes, localist and distributed, on the basis of computational efficiency, the ability to simultaneously process and activate many different concepts, and the structure for semantic cognition. The evidence for category and concept cells favors localist representation in the brain.