Independent Researcher

Honorary Associate at La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia

School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Development of a methodology and theoretical framework for melodic discrimination

About

I am attempting to develop a practical connectionist mechanism for compositional and analogical memory.  This is concerned with the ability to recognise and predict situations and objects in terms of the pattern of relationships between their component parts independently of the precise identity of the component parts.  Current standard connectionist techniques have limited capacity to deal with patterns of relationships and consequently have difficulty recognising novel configurations of familiar components or recognising familiar patterns of relationship when the components being related are novel.  Human analogical reasoning is the extreme example of the neural functionality I am striving for.  I believe that cognition is based on sensorimotor planning and that analogical retrieval is needed to allow the application of sensorimotor schemas to novel and abstract situations.  I argue that high-level perception and all cognition are fundamentally the same process and are implemented by this neural mechanism of compositional, analogical memory.

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