The required measures of phase segregation in distributed cortical processing

Many neuroscience studies suggest that synchronous and oscillatory activity plays an important role in coordinating computations among cortical areas. Elsewhere, the temporal correlation hypothesis has been put forth which relies on synchrony. Activity in distributed cortical areas represents features of an object if it appears synchronously and features of different objects are distinguished if they are desynchronized with others, overcoming the binding problem. The segregation of neural activity into distinct phase windows helps preserve coherence as it propagates to deeper layers of the cortex. Here, the timing is crucial if synchronized spike volleys must meet after crossing different cortical paths, which impose different transmission delays. We propose that a phase segregation mechanism is needed to desynchronize neural responses at their origin for representing multiple objects. In particular, the inhibitory inter-neurons that are found in the cortex give the desired behavior as demonstrated in other studies. The purpose of the present research is to analyze required measures of phase segregation for ensuring coherence in topologies that contain direct and indirect pathways from a source to a destination area. Our results are compatible with psychological studies. We employ the spike response model on top of a localist, connectionist architecture designed for representing symbolic and relational information for verifying our results.