Representation Of Sensory Information In Self-Organizing Feature Maps, And Relation Of These Maps To Distributed Memory Networks

Information processing in future computers as well as in higher animals must refer to a complicated knowledge base which is somewhat vaguely called memory. Especially if one is dealing with natural data such as images and sounds, one has to realize the two aspects to be discussed: 1. The internal representations of sensory information in the computing networks. 2. The memory mechanism itself. Most of the experimental and theoretical works have concentrated on the latter problem, which might be named the "back-end" problem of memory. This paper contains some new results which show that both of the above functions, viz. formation of the internal representations and their storage, can be implemented simultaneously by an adaptive, massively parallel, self-organizing network.