Formation of Attention and Associative Memory based on Reinforcement Learning

An attention task, in which context information should be extracted from the first presented pattern, and the recognition answer of the second presented pattern should be generated using the context information, is employed in this paper. An Elman-type recurrent neural network is utilized to extract and keep the context information. A reinforcement signal that indicates whether the answer is correct or not, is only a signal that the system can obtain for the learning. Only by this learning, necessary context information became to be extracted and kept, and the system became to generate the correct answers. Furthermore, the function of an associative memory is observed in the feedback loop in the Elman-type neural network.