The Binding Problem

2017 ◽  
pp. 553-565
Author(s):  
Valerie Gray Hardcastle
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Elliott

The binding problem refers to the puzzle of how the brain combines objects’ properties such as motion, color, shape, location, sound, etc., from diverse regions of the brain and forms a unified subjective experience. Holographic physical systems, recently discovered darlings of theoretical physics, began with research into black holes but have since evolved into the study of condensed matter systems in the laboratory like superfluids and superconductors. A primary example is the AdS/CFT correspondence. A recent conjecture of this correspondence suggests that holographic systems combine information from across a boundary surface, sort out the simplest description of said information, and, in turn, use it to determine the geometry of spacetime itself in the interior - a kind of geometric hologram. Although we would never tend to think of these two processes as related, in this paper we point out ten similarities between the two and show that holographic systems are the only physical systems that match the subjective and computational characteristics of the binding problem.


2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (11) ◽  
pp. 1185-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh C.P. Botly ◽  
Eve De Rosa

The binding problem is the brain's fundamental challenge to integrate sensory information to form a unified representation of a stimulus. A recent nonhuman animal model suggests that acetylcholine serves as the neuromodulatory substrate for feature binding. We hypothesized that this animal model of cholinergic contributions to feature binding may be an analogue of human attention. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a cross-species study in which rats and humans learned comparable intramodal feature-conjunction (FC) and feature-singleton (FS) tasks. We challenged the cholinergic system of rats using the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine (0.2 mg/kg) and challenged the attentional system of humans by dividing attention. The two manipulations yielded strikingly similar patterns of behavior, impairing FC acquisition, while sparing FS acquisition and FC retrieval. These cross-species findings support the hypothesis that cholinergically driven attentional processes are essential to feature binding at encoding, but are not required for retrieval of neural representations of bound stimuli.


1993 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Garson
Keyword(s):  

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1663-1665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Elliott ◽  
Zhuanghua Shi ◽  
Sean D. Kelly

How does neuronal activity bring about the interpretation of visual space in terms of objects or complex perceptual events? If they group, simple visual features can bring about the integration of spikes from neurons responding to different features to within a few milliseconds. Considered as a potential solution to the “binding problem,” it is suggested that neuronal synchronization is the glue for binding together different features of the same object. This idea receives some support from correlated- and periodic-stimulus motion paradigms, both of which suggest that the segregation of a figure from ground is a direct result of the temporal correlation of visual signals. One could say that perception of a highly correlated visual structure permits space to be bound in time. However, on closer analysis, the concept of perceptual synchrony is insufficient to explain the conditions under which events will be seen as simultaneous. Instead, the grouping effects ascribed to perceptual synchrony are better explained in terms of the intervals of time over which stimulus events integrate and seem to occur simultaneously. This point is supported by the equivalence of some of these measures with well-established estimates of the perceptual moment. However, it is time in extension and not the instantaneous that may best describe how seemingly simultaneous features group. This means that studies of perceptual synchrony are insufficient to address the binding problem.


2019 ◽  
pp. 307-329
Author(s):  
Léa Salje
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 149-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur G Shapiro ◽  
Laysa Hedjar
Keyword(s):  

Daímon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Modesto Gómez Alonso

It will be argued that personal agency, far from lacking epistemic value, contributes to knowledge in a substantial way. To this end, it will be claimed that what Sosa calls an epistemic perspective is necessary to solve the binding problem in epistemology at the three junctures at which it can occur: as the Pyrrhonian question of whether one can rationally endorse one’s epistemic rationality; as the problem of the epistemic status of guessing; and as the enquiry into the contribution of the agential perspective for evading coincidental luck. Our aim has been that of elucidating and expanding Sosa’s virtue perspectivism.


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