A biologically motivated associative memory architecture

Abstract

A synthesis of analytical techniques from the fields of biology, mathematics, computer science and engineering are used to model the information processing characteristics of the mammalian cerebellar cortex. By viewing anatomically different neurons as representing network elements whose input-output functions are different, a mechanism for distributing information throughout the memory is proposed. The functional circuitry developed to implement this feature is called the microcircuit. Overlapping microcircuit activity is used to describe the memory's read and write operations. Key features of the memory model include: (1) its use of a sparse interconnection network, (2) its ability to manipulate very large input patterns, (3) its distributed storage of input data patterns and (4) its statistical reconstruction of stored patterns during memory read operations. Quantitative measures for the memory's recall fidelity and storage capacity are derived and results of computer simulations are presented.