We present a methodological framework enabling a detailed description of the performance of Hopfield-like attractor neural networks (ANN) in the first two iterations. Using the Bayesian approach, we find that performance is improved when a history-based term is included in the neuron's dynamics. A further enhancement of the network's performance is achieved by judiciously choosing the censored neurons (those which become active in a given iteration) on the basis of the magnitude of their post-synaptic potentials. The contribution of biologically plausible, censored, historydependent dynamics is especially marked in conditions of low firing activity and sparse connectivity, two important characteristics of the mammalian cortex. In such networks, the performance attained is higher than the performance of two'independent' iterations, which represents an upper bound on the performance of history-independent networks.

This study demonstrates a paradigm for modeling speech production based on neural networks. Using physiological data from speech utterances, a neural network learns the forward dynamics relating motor commands to muscles and the ensuing articulator behavior that allows articulator trajectories to be generated from motor commands constrained by phoneme input strings and global performance parameters. From these movement trajectories, a second neural network generates PARCOR parameters that are then used to synthesize the speech acoustics.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an essential technique for data compression and feature extraction, and has been widely used in statistical data analysis, communication theory, pattern recognition and image processing. In the neural network literature, a lot of studies have been made on learning rules for implementing PCA or on networks closely related to PCA (see Xu & Yuille, 1993 for a detailed reference list which contains more than 30 papers related to these issues).

Learning curves show how a neural network is improved as the number of t.raiuing examples increases and how it is related to the network complexity. The present paper clarifies asymptotic properties and their relation of t.wo learning curves, one concerning the predictive loss or generalization loss and the other the training loss. The result gives a natural definition of the complexity of a neural network. Moreover, it provides a new criterion of model selection.

The HN calculates the Hamming distance between the input pattern and each memory pattern, and selects the memory with the smallest distance. It is composed of two subnets: The similarity subnet, consisting of an n-neuron input layer connected with an m-neuron memory layer, calculates the number of equal bits between the input and each memory pattern. The winner-take-all (WTA) subnet, consisting of a fully connected m-neuron topology, selects the memory neuron that best matches the input pattern.

The planar thallium-201 myocardial perfusion scintigram is a widely used diagnostic technique for detecting and estimating the risk of coronary artery disease. Neural networks learned to interpret 100 thallium scintigrams as determined by individual expert ratings. Standard error backpropagation was compared to standard LMS, and LMS combined with one layer of RBF units. Using the "leave-one-out" method, generalization was tested on all 100 cases. Training time was determined automatically from cross-validation perfonnance. Best perfonnance was attained by the RBF/LMS network with three hidden units per view and compares favorably with human experts.

The primate brain must solve two important problems in grasping movements. The first problem concerns the recognition of grasped objects: specifically, how does the brain integrate visual and motor information on a grasped object? The second problem concerns hand shape planning: specifically, how does the brain design the hand configuration suited to the shape of the object and the manipulation task? A neural network model that solves these problems has been developed. The operations of the network are divided into a learning phase and an optimization phase. In the learning phase, internal representations, which depend on the grasped objects and the task, are acquired by integrating visual and somatosensory information. In the optimization phase, the most suitable hand shape for grasping an object is determined by using a relaxation computation of the network.

So far there has been no general method for relating extracellular electrophysiological measured activity of neurons in the associative cortex to underlying network or "cognitive" states. We propose to model such data using a multivariate Poisson Hidden Markov Model. We demonstrate the application of this approach for temporal segmentation of the firing patterns, and for characterization of the cortical responses to external stimuli. Using such a statistical model we can significantly discriminate two behavioral modes of the monkey, and characterize them by the different firing patterns, as well as by the level of coherency of their multi-unit firing activity. Our study utilized measurements carried out on behaving Rhesus monkeys by M. Abeles, E. Vaadia, and H. Bergman, of the Hadassa Medical School of the Hebrew University. 1 Introduction Hebb hypothesized in 1949 that the basic information processing unit in the cortex is a cell-assembly which may include thousands of cells in a highly interconnected network[l].

Some improved generalization properties are demonstrat.ed

The primate brain must solve two important problems in grasping movements. The first problem concerns the recognition of grasped objects: specifically, how does the brain integrate visual and motor information on a grasped object? The second problem concerns hand shape planning: specifically, how does the brain design the hand configuration suited to the shape of the object and the manipulation task? A neural network model that solves these problems has been developed. The operations of the network are divided into a learning phase and an optimization phase. In the learning phase, internal representations, which depend on the grasped objects and the task, are acquired by integrating visual and somatosensory information. In the optimization phase, the most suitable hand shape for grasping an object is determined by using a relaxation computation of the network.