Collaborative Cell Assemblies: Building Blocks of Cortical Computation

The goal of this chapter is to propose a candidate for consideration as a building block of cortical computation. The candidate in question is the collaborative cell assembly (CCA), and I will make the case in the rest of this chapter that the concept provides a unifying framework for accounting for the mechanisms of perceptual “binding” in the sensory areas of the brain, as well as providing a mechanism for the incremental construction of cognitive and language systems from simpler components.