Thesis available: A Stagewise Treatment of Connectionism

[Adriaan Tijsseling]

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63 pages total


A Stagewise Treatment of Connectionism

Roy Meijer
Cognitive Artificial Intelligence
Department of Philosophy
Utrecht University
Heidelberglaan 8
3584 CS  Utrecht
The Netherlands
August 1994

Roy.Meijer at phil.ruu.nl

Keywords: connectionism, developmental psychology, methodology, neural
networks, symbolism.


ABSTRACT
Connectionism, the research program that is based on neural network
techniques, has continued to grow explosively since its reappearance on the
cognitive scene in the middle of the eighties. Usually some aspect of human
cognition is singled out (e.g. the role of attention in visual tasks),
modelled and experimented with. Experimenters often conclude that neural
networks are able to do the task while showing some interesting side
effects, which sometimes resemble human behavior in those tasks. But what
happens next? It looks as if much fragmented work is being done without
some sort of coherence, or some sort of strategy.