In this paper, the number of associative concepts is focused on, and action concept associations analyzed, in order to find out the effects of thematic relationships between concepts during the creative design process. To elucidate the mechanism of the thinking process in creative design, a series of experiments were carried out. Design tasks were selected for two different kinds of concept syn...

An associative memory is a framework of content-addressable memory that stores a collection of message vectors (or a dataset) over a neural network while enabling a neurally feasible mechanism to recover any message in the dataset from its noisy version. Designing an associative memory requires addressing two main tasks: 1) learning phase: given a dataset, learn a concise representation of the ...

An increasing number of empirical phenomena that were previously interpreted as a result of cognitive control, turn out to reflect (in part) simple associative-learning effects. A prime example is the proportion congruency effect, the finding that interference effects (such as the Stroop effect) decrease as the proportion of incongruent stimuli increases. While this was previously regarded as s...

Behaving efficiently (optimally or near-optimally) is central to animals' adaptation to their environment. Much evolutionary biology assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that optimal behavioural strategies are genetically inherited, yet the behaviour of many animals depends crucially on learning. The question of how learning contributes to optimal behaviour is largely open. Here we propose an ass...

Whitney et al. (Reports, 2 January 2009, p. 130) investigated the mechanism of iridescence in hibiscus and tulip flowers and suggested that bumblebees are able to use this iridescence as a pollination cue. However, their study failed to isolate iridescence from other coincident visual cues, leaving open questions regarding the importance of iridescent stimuli in foraging-based associative learn...

We demonstrate that networks of neuronal oscillators with three-body interactions can store multiple phase-lag patterns as continuous attractors, along which the degree of synchrony varies continuously. Such a mechanism could greatly enhance the encoding and retrieval of analog information in cortical neuronal networks. Keywords—Continuous attractors, Three-body interactions, Associative memory...

A recent study shows that avoidance conditioning in the cephalopod Octopus vulgaris is mediated by long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity thought to be important in vertebrate associative learning. Thus, LTP appears to be an evolutionarily conserved learning mechanism.

Postsynaptic release of endocannabinoids can inhibit presynaptic neurotransmitter release on short and long timescales. This retrograde inhibition occurs at both excitatory and inhibitory synapses and may provide a mechanism for synaptic gain control, short-term associative plasticity, reduction of synaptic crosstalk, and metaplasticity.

The mechanism of carbonyl substitution in [Fe(Ind)(CO)(2)I] (Ind = C(9)H(7)(-), indenyl) by P(OMe)(3) was investigated by means of DFT calculations. The most favourable path involves a spin crossover of the complex from the ground state singlet to the triplet potential energy surface (S = 1), followed by dissociative loss of CO, and phosphite addition to the coordinatively unsaturated intermedi...