"Instead of showing the computer two objects in the same image, the researchers showed the computer the objects one at a time in separate images. The experiment

"Instead of showing the computer two objects in the same image, the researchers showed the computer the objects one at a time in separate images. The experiments showed that the algorithms had no problem learning same-or-different relationship as long as they didn’t have to view the two objects in the same image." There is a lot of research on attention and saliency mechanisms. Itti, Koch, Niebur had a model. Adaptive resonance theory from Grossberg has a successive winner take all strategy as well. Global workspace theory from Baars similarly. It is a very logical cognitive architecture to come up with. If I'm correct also the new architecture from Hinton separates object recognition from the position information. That these are separate pathways in mammals is also already long known. It would have been nice if they would have come up with a method in which these separate pathways and/or a sequential attention mechanism would arise from more basic principles and not hardcoded by researchers.