The invention comprises e-circuits built from basic modules of e-cells which are capable of: recognizing a previously memorized percept anywhere within an arbitrarily large input field without incurring delay related to size of the search space; isolating a previously memorized percept within the input field when in the adjacent presence of other percepts and closely related distractors; locating and recognizing all occurrences of a repeated subfield within the input field, even in the presence of closely related distractors; and performing sequential shift attention between a number of different percepts in the input field. The invention is applicable to various recognition tasks including those in sensory domains such as speech and music recognition, vision, olefaction, and touch. The invention also comprises a method to apply these e-circuits specifically to the task of learning and recognizing subjects in images in any two dimensional signal space under translation, and if necessary, scaling, rotation and other transforms.