Feedback Modulated Attention Within A Predictive Framework

Attention is both ubiquitous throughout and key to our cognitive experience. It has been shown to filter out mundane stimuli, while simultaneously communicating specific stimuli from the lowest levels of perception through to the highest levels of cognition. In this paper we present a connectionist system with mechanisms that produce both exogenous (bottom-up) and endogenous (top-down) attention. The foundational algorithm of our system is the Temporal Pooler (TP), a neocortically inspired algorithm that learns and predicts temporal sequences. We make a number of modifications to the Temporal Pooler and place it in a framework which is inspired by predictive coding. We use a novel technique in which feedback connections elicit endogenous attention by disrupting the learned representations of attended sequences. Our experiments show that this approach successfully filters attended stimuli and suppresses unattended stimuli.