Horizontal Connections

I have still to find a neural model of the competitive selection mechanism that finds the winning node of a SOM. The process has been parallelised many times for parallel SOM implementations based on FPGAs or CUDA (such as Aquila).  There is a lot of work on horizontal/lateral connections in the cortex.  It would be very interesting to study a SOM implementation using such lateral connections to select SOM winners.

Endogenously Active Elements

Endogenous activity has been raised as an important mechanism for cognition, both in terms of neural self-organisation (Choa and Choi 2012) and for control (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2010 ).  Such a mechanism would be a very interesting extension to our PLANCS framework for behavior-based robotics (Dahl and Giraud-Carrier 2005).

• Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. (2010) Understanding the brain as an endogenously active mechanism. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, Texas. (see Bechtel's web site http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/index.html)
• Choa, M. W. and Choi, M. Y. (2012) Spontaneous organization of the cortical structure through endogenous neural firing and gap junction transmission, Neural Networks 31:46–52.
• T. S. Dahl and C. Giraud-Carrier, "Incremental Development of Adaptive Behaviors using Trees of Self-Contained Solutions," Adaptive Behavior, 13(3)243-260, 2005.