Margin Notes On 24.8 "How Picture-Frames Work"


Minsky modifies the trans-frame approach to create a picture-frame. In this system, the frame terminals are attached to a set of nine direction nemes instead of the pronomes in the trans-frame.

With K-lines attached to this kind of system, visual learning becomes possible. "Imagine that you're looking at some real-world scene. Your eyes move in various directions, controlled in some way by direction-nemes. Now suppose that every time you move your eyes, the same direction-nemes also activate the K-lines attached to the corresponding terminals of a certain vision-frame. Suppose, also, that those K-lines are ready to form new memories. Then each time you look in a different direction, your vision-system will describe what you see -- and the corresponding K-lines will record what you see when you look in that direction!"

NB: Cool idea hear is the idea of cross-modal associative memories. In other words, particular visual information will be recalled by the appropriate eye-movement cue. This makes me think of other possible functions served by parietal cortex. Instead of computing mappings between coordinate systems in different modalities, might it also be working on establishing associative links between these modalities?


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