Assemblies as Phase-Locked Pattern Sets That Collectively Win the Competition for Coherence

摘要

The formation of temporal coding assemblies requires synchronizing mechanisms to establish the coherence of the corresponding patterns, as well as desynchronizing mechanisms that separate it from other possibly overlapping patterns. Here, we use a recently proposed desynchronizating mechanism, denoted as acceleration. This mechanism lets each unit of the network oscillate with higher frequency in case of stronger and/or more coherent input from the other units. In the context of Hebbian memory, it implies a competition for coherence among the stored patterns. The profound effect on the segmentation of patterns is demonstrated. Going beyond earlier discussions, we also illustrate the concept of an assembly as a collection of phase-locked coherent patterns. This points to a role of synchronization strength as controlling the degree of association, that is, determining the number of patterns that are collected in the assembly.