A memory system and a method as well as robotic apparatus are strong against noise and excellent in memory capacity, volume of calculation, quantity of physical memory, and memory responsiveness. It is designed to store, in the frame form, the first information on a symbol as well as the second information on a symbol supplied separately from a variety of inputs in relation to competitive neurons corresponding to the symbol in a way to strengthen the connection between relevant input neurons and competitive neurons in response to the input patterns of a variety of inputs for each symbol with the use of a competitive neural network having a set of input layers composed of a plurality of input neurons and a set of competitive layers composed of a plurality of competitive neurons.