Abstract:
It is intriguing and challenging to try to understand what rules the inner dynamics of thoughts, taking them along folded and tangled paths. To go beyond the perceptual-motor cycle, to protracted cortical dynamics is, however, as fascinating as difficult.
Attractor dynamics has been proposed to be relevant to global cortical function also in situation in which the cortex actually produces behaviors, e.g. speech, as opposed to just responding to a stimulus from outside. It appears then to particular interest to investigate within a modeling framework the protracted cortical dynamics that follow the standard cued retrieval operation.
In this talk I will present a model of Potts autoassociative neural network producing a chain of subsequent memories retrievals. I will show that such a network, depending on the external parameters, presents a variety of dynamical phases, passing from a non-associative condition to an infinite chain of latching transitions.