AI summary

This paper introduces the perceptron, a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain. The model uses statistical separability to address limitations in existing brain models, offering a potential solution to difficulties in accounting for biological intelligence.

Abstract

If we are eventually to understand the capability of higher organisms for perceptual recognition, generalization, recall, and thinking, we must first have answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How is information about the physical world sensed, or detected, by the biological system? 2. In what form is information stored, or remembered? 3. How does information contained in storage, or in memory, influence recognition and behavior? The first of these questions is in the province of sensory physiology, and is the only one for which appreciable understanding has been achieved. This article will be concerned pri-marily with the second and third questions, which are still subject to a vast amount of speculation, and where the few relevant facts currently sup-plied by neurophysiology have not yet been integrated into an acceptable theory. With regard to the second question, two alternative positions have been maintained. The first suggests that storage of sensory information is in the form of coded representations or images, with some sort of one-to-one mapping between the sensory stimulus and the stored pattern. According to this hypothesis, if one understood the code or "wiring diagram" of the nerv-ous system, one should, in principle, be able to discover exactly what an organism remembers by reconstruct-ing the original sensory patterns from the "memory traces" which they have left, much as we might develop a photographic negative, or translate the pattern of electrical charges in the "memory" of a digital computer. This hypothesis is appealing in its simplicity and ready intelligibility, and a large family of theoretical brain models has been developed around the idea of a coded, representational mem-ory (2, 3, 9, 14). The alternative ap-proach, which stems from the tradi-tion of British empiricism, hazards the guess that the images of stimuli may never really be recorded at all, and that the central nervous system simply acts as an intricate switching network, where retention takes the form of new connections, or pathways, between centers of activity. In many of the more recent developments of this position (Hebb's "cell assembly," and Hull's "cortical anticipatory goal response," for example) the "re-sponses" which are associated to stimuli may be entirely contained within the CNS itself. In this case the response represents an "idea" rather than an action. The impor-tant feature of this approach is that there is never any simple mapping of the stimulus into memory, according to some code which would permit its later reconstruction. Whatever in-