Neural Population Dynamics and Cognitive Function

Representations in the brain are encoded as patterns of activity of large populations of neurons. The science of population encoded representations, also known as parallel distributed processing (PDP), achieves neurological verisimilitude and has been able to account for a large number of cognitive phenomena in normal people, including reaction times (and reading latencies), stimulus recognition, the effect of stimulus salience on attention, perceptual invariance, simultaneous egocentric and allocentric visual processing, top-down/bottom-up processing, language errors, the effect of statistical regularities of experience, frequency, and age of acquisition, instantiation of rules and symbols, content addressable memory and the capacity for pattern completion, preservation of function in the face of noisy or distorted input, inference, parallel constraint satisfaction, the binding problem and gamma coherence, principles of hippocampal function, the location of knowledge in the brain, limitations in the scope and depth of knowledge acquired through experience, and Piagetian stages of cognitive development. PDP studies have been able to provide a coherent account for impairment in a variety of language functions resulting from stroke or dementia in a large number of languages and the phenomenon of graceful degradation observed in such studies. They have also made important contributions to our understanding of attention (including hemispatial neglect), emotional function, executive function, motor planning, visual processing, decision making, and neuroeconomics. The relationship of neural network population dynamics to electroencephalographic rhythms is starting to emerge. Nevertheless, PDP approaches have scarcely penetrated major areas of study of cognition, including neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychology, as well as much of cognitive psychology. This article attempts to provide an overview of PDP principles and applications that addresses a broader audience.