The Properties of Higher Cognitive Processes and How They Can be Modelled in Neural Nets

It is proposed that the distinction between basic and higher cognitive processes can be captured by the difference between associative and relational processes. Properties of relational processing include reification of the link between entities, so higher-order relations have lower-order relations as arguments, whereas an associative link per se cannot be a component of another association. Therefore relational processes can be hierarchical and recursive, whereas associative structures are flat. Relations, unlike associations, also have the properties of omni-directional access and systematicity. Relational processes support reasoning and contentindependent transfer, and have many of the properties of symbolic models. Typical feedforward neural nets do not implement these properties in a natural way, but they can be implemented with tensor product nets. The requirements for neural nets to model higher cognitive processes are considered. The debate about the nature of higher cognition ..