Robust Spiking Attractor Networks with a Hard Winner-Take-All Neuron Circuit

Attractor networks are widely understood to be a re-occurring primitive that underlies cognitive function. Stabilising activity in spiking attractor networks however remains a difficult task, especially when implemented in analog integrated circuits (aIC). We introduce here a novel circuit implementation of a hard Winner-Take-All (hWTA) mechanism, in which competing neurons' refractory circuits are coupled together, and thus their spiking is forced to be mutually exclusive. We demonstrate stable persistent-firing attractor dynamics in a small on-chip network consisting of hWTA-connected neurons and excitatory recurrent synapses. Its utility within larger networks is demonstrated in simulation, and shown to support overlapping attractors and be robust to synaptic weight mismatch. The realised hWTA mechanism is thus useful for stabilising activity in spiking networks composed of unreliable components, without the need for careful parameter tuning.