THE HEBBIAN PARADIGM REINTEGRATED - LOCAL REVERBERATIONS AS INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONS

The neurophysiological evidence from the Miyashita groups's experiment s on monkeys as well as cognitive experience common to us all suggests that local neuronal spike rate distributions might persist in the abs ence of their eliciting stimulus. In Hebb's cell-assembly theory, lear ning dynamics stabilize such self-maintaining reverberations. Quasi-qu antitive modeling of the experimental data on internal representation in association-cortex modules identifies the reverberations (delay spi ke activity) as the internal code (representation). This leads to cogn itive and neurophysiological predictions, many following directly from the language used to describe the activity in the experimental delay period, others from the details of how the model captures the properti es of the internal representations.