Understanding the Role of Recurrent Connections in Assembly Calculus

Abstract

In this note, we explore the role of recurrent connections in Assembly Calculus through a number of experiments conducted on models with and without recurrent connections. We observe that as- semblies can be formed even in the absence of recurrent connections, but also find that models with recurrent connections are more robust to noisy inputs. We also investigate the spectral structure of the synaptic weights and find intriguing similarities between models of neural assemblies and associative memories.