Multiple Stability of a Sparsely Encoded Attractor Neural Network Model for the Inferior Temporal Cortex
Tomoyuki Kimoto, Tatsuya Uezu, Masato Okada · Journal of the Physical Society of Japan · 2008
We study a neural network model for the inferior temporal cortex, in terms of finite memory loading and sparse coding. We show that an uncorrelated Hopfield-type attractor and some correlated attractors have multiple stability, and examine the retrieval dynamics for these attractors when the initial state is set to a noise-degraded memory pattern. Then, we show that there is a critical initial overlap: that is, the system converges to the correlated attractor when the noise level is large, and otherwise to the Hopfield-type attractor. Furthermore, we study the time course of the correlation between the correlated attractors in the retrieval dynamics. On the basis of these theoretical results, we resolve the controversy regarding previous physiologic experimental findings regarding neuron properties in the inferior temporal cortex and propose a new experimental paradigm.