Generalizable Relational Binding from Coarse-coded Distributed Representations

We present a model of binding of relationship information in a spatial domain (e.g., square above triangle) that uses low-order coarse-coded conjunctive representations instead of more popular temporal synchrony mechanisms. Supporters of temporal synchrony argue that conjunctive representations lack both efficiency (i.e., combinatorial numbers of units are required) and systematicity (i.e., the resulting representations are overly specific and thus do not support generalization to novel exemplars). Tocounter these claims, we show that our model: a) uses far fewer hidden units than the number of conjunctions represented, by using coarse-coded,distributed representations where each unit has a broad tuning curve through high-dimensional conjunction space, and b) is capable ofconsiderable generalization to novel inputs.