Model Of A Cortical-Basal Ganglionic Module That Encodes The Serial Order Of Events

Jun Wang, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UIUC
Jim Houk, Professor, Department of Physiology, Northwestern University

A model of serial order encoding, based on Beiser/Houk (1998) and Houk (2005), is presented and simulated using the NetLogo multi-agent platform. The main computational features of each microscopic module in the model are competitive pattern classification and working memory, and the main computational feature of the macroscopic module is recursion. Simulation of a macroscopic module comprised of an array of 30 microscopic modules is capable of perfect encoding in a 3-item task. If pathology causes the number of functional microscopic modules to be reduced, the encoding network becomes saturated and makes errors. The latter situation resembles one of the deficits in schizophrenia (Fraser et al. 2004). Future work will link our encoding module to a decoding module in order to model serial order recall of events.