Imagery in the Entropic Associative Memory

The Entropic Associative Memory is a novel declarative and distributed computational model of associative memory. The model is general, conceptually simple, and offers an alternative to models developed within the artificial neural networks paradigm. The memory uses a standard table as its medium, where the information is stored in an indeterminate form, and the entropy plays a functional and operation role. The memory register operation abstracts the input cue with the current memory content and is productive; memory recognition is performed through a logical test; and memory retrieval is constructive. The three operations can be performed in parallel using very few computing resources. In our previous work we explored the auto-associative properties of the memory and performed experiments to store, recognize and retrieve manuscript digits and letters with complete and incomplete cues, and also to recognize and learn phones, with satisfactory results. In such experiments a designated memory register was used to store all the objects of the same class, whereas in the present study we remove such restriction and use a single memory register to store all the objects in the domain. In this novel setting we explore the production of emerging objects and relations, such that cues are used not only to retrieve remembered objects, but also related and imaged objects, and to produce association chains. The present model supports the view that memory and classification are independent functions both conceptually and architecturally. The memory system can store images of the different modalities of perception and action, possibly multimodal, and offers a novel perspective on the imagery debate and computational models of declarative memory.