Exploring Abstract Pattern Representation in The Brain and Non-symbolic Neural Networks

Human cognitive and linguistic generativity depends on the ability to identify abstract relationships between perceptually dissimilar items. Marcus et al. (1999) found that human infants can rapidly discover and generalize patterns of syllable repetition (reduplication) that depend on the abstract property of identity, but simple recurrent neural networks (SRNs) could not. They interpreted these results as evidence that purely associative neural network models provide an inadequate framework for characterizing the fundamental generativity of human cognition. Here, we present a series of deep long short-term memory (LSTM) models that identify abstract syllable repetition patterns and words based on training with cochleagrams that represent auditory stimuli. We demonstrate that models trained to identify individual syllable trigram words and models trained to identify reduplication patterns discover representations that support classification of abstract repetition patterns. Simulations examined the effects of training categories (words vs. patterns) and pretraining to identify syllables, on the development of hidden node representations that support repetition pattern discrimination. Representational similarity analyses (RSA) comparing patterns of regional brain activity based on MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data to patterns of hidden node activation elicited by the same stimuli showed a significant correlation between brain activity localized in primarily posterior temporal regions and representations discovered by the models. These results suggest that associative mechanisms operating over discoverable representations that capture abstract stimulus properties account for a critical example of human cognitive generativity.