Effect of associative rules on the dynamics of conceptual combination in a neurodynamical model

Most models of thought are based on the idea of associative memory: The combination of distinct concepts through their association with each other based on experience. Thus, the pattern of associations in the mind is thought to be a critical factor in determining the ideas - both familiar and unfamiliar - that thought can generate. The Itinerant Dynamics with Emergent Attractors (IDEA) model has been proposed as a computational representation of the process by which ideas might emerge in an associative memory system. However, the effect of how “association” is defined in this context remains an important unexplored issue. In this paper, we consider three different ways of defining associations between concepts based on their joint usage in texts, and show that these lead to very different dynamics in the process of emergent conceptual combinations. We use data from two real-world text corpora to instantiate the model: The collected poems of Dylan Thomas, and the Memoirs of the economist Ludwig von Mises. The two sources differ greatly in the nature of their content as well as the statistics of their word usage, which makes them interesting subjects for comparison.