Derived from work in connectionism on recognition tasks and semantics, and articulated in the book The computational brain (1992) by Patricia S. Churchland and Terrence J. Sejnowski, it is the concept that single perceptual, cognitive or motor functions may be found over physically separate regions of the central nervous system, and that single regions of the nervous system may participate in multiple functions. In connectionism, it is another term for distributed network model.
See Auto-encoder networks, Cerebral cortex (functions), Connectionism, Neural net, Representation (mental)