Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition : Foundations

What makes people smarter than computers? These volumes by a pioneeringneurocomputing group suggest that the answer lies in the massively parallel architecture of thehuman mind. They describe a new theory of cognition called connectionism that is challenging theidea of symbolic computation that has traditionally been at the center of debate in theoreticaldiscussions about the mind.

The authors' theory assumes the mind is composed of agreat number of elementary units connected in a neural network. Mental processes are interactionsbetween these units which excite and inhibit each other in parallel rather than sequentialoperations. In this context, knowledge can no longer be thought of as stored in localizedstructures; instead, it consists of the connections between pairs of units that are distributedthroughout the network.

Volume 1 lays the foundations of this exciting theory ofparallel distributed processing, while Volume 2 applies it to a number of specific issues incognitive science and neuroscience, with chapters describing models of aspects of perception,memory, language, and thought.