But, says Yufik, agencies are more generally interested in the VAN because it's in complete contradiction to traditional cognitive paradigm models. Therefore, learning consists of building an archive of templates, and performance consists of pulling an element from that archive. Each template contains action recipes, which explains, the model holds, how experts make their decisions. This concept has been the basis for technologies such as neural networks, which have had minimal success at explaining both brain function and human behavior. The VAN model implies that these traditional notions mostly apply to animal learning and not to significantly more complex human learning.
Neuronal ensembles are the substrate of such components.
Experience influences contents and the order in which components are processed, but the decision maker can combine components and adjust them to the present situation. In this way, human behavior is not stereotyped, as the template model implies, but it can take advantage of past experiences without replicating them. The capability to apply past experiences in novel ways under unfamiliar and changing conditions is, in fact, the central feature of human intelligence largely absent in animals. The VAN model has some similarities with a theory presented at the symposium by nonengineer Gerald Edelman , director of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. According to Edelman, underlying consciousness is a distributed neural process that involves major regions of the thalamocortical system.