Analysis of positional competition in the boundary contour system

This work builds upon the proposal of the boundary contour system proposed in Grossberg and Mingolla (1985, 1987) as a subsystem of the FACADE architecture introduced in Grossberg (19900. The author analyses the positional sharpening capabilities of the competitive layers in the competitive cooperative loop. Positional sharpening as set up by Grossberg and Mingolla may be seen as a two-stage process, where a threshold-linear signal function transforms the input and drives the subsequent positional competition stage. The author draws the conclusion that positional sharpening is enforced by thresholding rather than by positional competition