Is there good evidence that Winner-take-all Networks exist in nervous systems?

Question

Can you recommend litterature/articles?

Answer 1

Touretzky and Hinton (1988) have designed a DC production system that implements a rule selection and firing cycle, and which supports a limited form of variable binding. In this system (DCPS), there are only 25 possible (coarse-coded) symbols; thus a "binding space" can be set up as a Winner-Take-All (WTA) network, in which one of the 25 possible symbols will be selected, via a process of constraint satisfaction, depending on the state of working memory and the best rule selected so far. It is not clear, however, that a WTA network approach will scale up to handle the extremely large number of symbols needed for high-level cognitive tasks. For more:http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~dyer/Papers/JETAI90DISTSYM/Jetai90DistSym.html