Abstract

Abstract—This is a theoretical, modeling, and algorithmic paper about the spatial aspect of brain-like information processing, modeled by the Developmental Network (DN) model. The new brain architecture allows the external environment (including teachers) to interact with the sensory ends S and the motor ends M of the skull-closed brain B through development. It does not allow the human programmer to hand-pick extra-body concepts or to handcraft the concept boundaries inside the brain B. Mathematically, the brain spatial processing performs real-time mapping from S(t)×B(t)×M(t) to S(t+1)×B(t+1)×M(t+1), through network updates, where the contents of S, B, M all emerge from experience. Using its limited resource, the brain does increasingly better through experience. A new principle is that the effector ends in M serve as hubs for concept learning and abstraction. The effector ends B serve also as input and the sensory ends S serve also as output. As DN embodiments, the Where-What Networks (WWNs) present three major function novelties — new concept abstraction, concept as emergent goals, and goal-directed perception. The WWN series appears to be the first general purpose emergent systems for detecting and recognizing multiple objects in complex backgrounds. Among others, the most significant new mechanism is general-purpose top-down attention. Index Terms—Mental architecture, cortical representation,

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