Segmentation, Binding, and Illusory Conjunctions

We investigate binding within the framework of a model of excitatory and inhibitory cell assemblies that form an oscillating neural network. Our model is composed of two such networks that are connected through their inhibitory neurons. The excitatory cell assemblies represent memory patterns. The latter have different meanings in the two networks, representing two different attributes of an object, such as shape and color. The networks segment an input that contains mixtures of such pairs into staggered oscillations of the relevant activities. Moreover, the phases of the oscillating activities representing the two attributes in each pair lock with each other to demonstrate binding. The system works very well for two inputs, but displays faulty correlations when the number of objects is larger than two. In other words, the network conjoins attributes of different objects, thus showing the phenomenon of "illusory conjunctions," as in human vision.