Clustering of Stored Memories in an Attractor Network with Local Competition

In this paper we study an attractor network with units that compete locally for activation and we prove that a reduced version of it has fixpoint dynamics. An analysis, complemented by simulation experiments, of the local characteristics of the network's attractors with respect to a parameter controlling the intensity of the local competition is performed. We find that the attractors are hierarchically clustered when the parameter of the local competition is changed.