PSY 140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Conventional Memory, Connectionism, Cognitive Science
Document Summary
Connectionism: connectionism first appeared in the early 1980s as a force and is now a significant factor in language development, categorization and decision-making research (mahoney, 1993) Clark (1993: ix) optimistically wrote about connectionism that it "promises to be not only a new tool in the toolkit of the cognitive scientist, but the catalyst for a more fruitful conception of the entire cognitive science project" It is evident when reading the literature that connectionism is commonly known as a type of cognitive psychology, but there is little doubt that it also has something when common with behaviourism. Therefore, neither approach distinguishes between the cognitive and the biological: "all emphasize that learning takes place mainly through changes in the nervous system" (tonnessen, 1999: 391) The emergence of connectionism has been related to supercomputer growth. A variety of models were developed to take account of the vision and cognition developments: research related to brain activation systems has also greatly affected connectionist models.
