Rowan Sommers | "When connectionism met semantics", starring the hippocampus

An important goal of semantics is to explain how words refer to objects through context. Connectionist theories are immensely popular in neuroscience at the moment: most cognitive neuroscientists believe that cognition can be explained by the spread of activation over hierarchical, semantic networks. While connectionism can partially explain how the brain understands word reference, I will argue that it cannot explain all phenomena related to reference. Instead, we propose to complement connectionist networks with a separate bundle memory module that allows us to explain a greater range of referential phenomena. Finally, we will make the case that the hippocampus implements this bundle memory module.