Dynamic Models of Simple Judgments: II. Properties of a Self-Organizing PAGAN (Parallel, Adaptive, Generalized Accumulator Network) Model for Multi-Choice Tasks

This is the second of two papers comparing connectionist and traditional stochastic latency mechanisms with respect to their ability to account for simple judgments. In the first, we reviewed evidence for a self-regulating accumulator module for twoand three-category discrimination. In this paper, we examine established neural network models that have been applied to predicting response time measures, and discuss their representational and adaptational limitations. We go on to describe and evaluate the network implementation of a Parallel Adaptive Generalized Accumulator Network (PAGAN), based on the interconnection of a number of self-regulating, generalized accumulator modules. The enhancement of PAGAN through the incorporation of distributed connectionist representation is briefly discussed.