new book announcement: Rethinking Innateness

[Jeff Elman]

RETHINKING INNATENESS
A Connectionist Perspective on Development

by 

Jeffrey L. Elman, Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H.  Johnson,
Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, Kim Plunkett

    "Rethinking Innateness is a milestone as important as the
    appearance ten years ago of the PDP books. More integrated in its
    structure, more biological in its approach, this book provides a
    new theoretical framework for cognition that is based on dynamics,
    growth, and learning. Study this book if you are interested in how
    minds emerge from developing brains."

			Terrence J. Sejnowski 
			Professor, Salk Institute for Biological Studies


Rethinking Innateness asks the question, "What does it really mean to
say that a behavior is innate?" The authors describe a new framework in
which interactions, occurring at all levels, give rise to emergent
forms and behaviors. These outcomes often may be highly constrained and
universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in
any domain-specific way.

One of the key contributions of Rethinking Innateness is a taxonomy of
ways in which a behavior can be innate. These include constraints at
the level of representation, architecture, and timing; typically,
behaviors arise through the interaction of constraints at several of
these levels.

The ideas are explored through dynamic models inspired by a new kind of
"developmental connectionism," a marriage of connectionist models and
developmental neurobiology, forming a new theoretical framework for the
study of behavioral development. While relying heavily on the
conceptual and computational tools provided by connectionism,
Rethinking Innateness also identifies ways in which these tools need to
be enriched by closer attention to biology.

Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling series        
A Bradford Book        
November 1996
ISBN 0-262-05052-8
475 pp.                     
$45.00 (cloth)              

MIT Press WWW page, with ordering information:
http://www-mitpress.mit.edu:80/mitp/recent-books/cog/elmrh.html