Recent progress on neural models of seeing and visualisation

Abstract

How can a system with visual input become capable of visualising what is meant by new combinations of known words? For example, it is possible for most of us to visualise a blue banana with red spots even though such an object would never have formed part of our experience. The authors discuss a neural system which is capable of simple forms of this kind of visualisation. It is shown that success in this task depends on the activity of a neural module whose firing patterns represent the 'visual awareness' of the system and the way that this module interacts with others in the system. The paper discloses the first set of results from this ongoing research project.