Connectionism: Theory and Practice

Over the last decade, an emerging form of computational modeling has steadily gained the respect of many researchers as a radically new and promising approach to cognitive science. Known by a number of names, including "connectionism," "neural networks," and "parallel distributed processing" (PDP), this method of computation attempts to model the neural proocesses that are assumed to underlie cognitive functions in human beings. Unlike the digital computation methods used by Al researchers, conn…