Nearly all of the research investigating the modular nature of the mind/brain in general, and the acquisition of functional specializations in particular, is behavioral or neuroscientific in character. The progress of this research effort has been impeded by a lack of computational studies that attempt to relate functional properties with underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. Jacobs's research program has developed a family of computational architectures, referred to as mixtures-of- experts architectures, that acquire functional specializations by combining associative learning mechanisms and competitive learning mechanisms. Within the mixtures-of-experts computational framework, a surprising result is that the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of functional specializations and the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of modular integrations are identical. The goal of the proposed research is to develop these mechanisms for the purpose of acquiring modular integrations. Studies one through three investigate bootstrap learning; that is, the ability to use solutions to simpler tasks as """"""""building blocks"""""""" for more difficult tasks.
One aim of these studies is to investigate the role of context-dependent visual object representations in the acquisition of invariant visual representations. Studies four and five use the mixtures-of-experts architecture to investigate the aggregation of multiple expert opinions. In particular, they examine the issue of whether modular integrations during visual processing should be based on selection or on combination.
