Learning to Attend, Recognize, and Predict the World

This chapter begins to explain many of our most important perceptual and cognitive abilities, including how we rapidly learn to categorize and recognize so many objects and events in the world, how we remember and anticipate events that may occur in familiar situations, how we pay attention to events that particularly interest us, and how we become conscious of these events. These abilities enable us to engage in fantasy activities such as visual imagery, internalized speech, and planning. They support our ability to learn language quickly and to complete and consciously hear speech sounds in noise. The chapter begins to explain key differences between perception and recognition, and introduces Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, which is now the most advanced cognitive and neural theory of how our brains learn to attend, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world. ART cycles of resonance and reset solve the stability-plasticity dilemma so that we can learn quickly without new learning forcing catastrophic forgetting of previously learned memories. ART can learn quickly or slowly, with supervision and without it, and both many-to-one maps and one-to-many maps. It uses learned top-down expectations, attentional focusing, and mismatch-mediated hypothesis testing to do so, and is thus a self-organizing production system. ART can be derived from a simple thought experiment, and explains and predicts many psychological and neurobiological data about normal behavior. When these processes break down in specific ways, they cause symptoms of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer’s disease.