Figure 7: Representation of novel objects in terms of similarities to familiar ones. The plot is a two-dimensional rendition (produced by MDS) of a ten-dimensional space spanned by the outputs of ten prototypes modules, in a pilot implementation of the Chorus scheme. Each point in this plot corresponds to a view of an object; views belonging to the same object cluster together. The objects on which the modules have been trained are indicated by the small icons; the larger icons point to three novel test objects. Note that representations of similar objects (e.g., the quadrupeds) reside near each other; moreover, the novel quadruped (the giraffe) has been grouped with its likes. Because of the poor resolution of the front end of this system (implemented by a bank of 250 Gaussian receptive fields, each about 1/10 of the size of the stimulus images), objects that resemble each other at a coarse scale are sometimes confused (e.g., the manatee, or the sea cow, has been placed near the van; in the full ten-dimensional space, the manatee, which was a novel test object, was found to be similar to the tuna, the cow, and the automobile wagon, in that order). For a description of this system, see [Edelman and Duvdevani-Bar, 1997a].