new book announcement: Exercises in Rethinking Innateness

[Jeff Elman]

EXERCISES IN RETHINKING INNATENESS
A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations

by Kim Plunkett and Jeffrey L. Elman 


This book is the companion volume to Rethinking Innateness: A
Connectionist Perspective on Development (The MIT Press, 1996), which
proposed a new theoretical framework to answer the question "What does
it mean to say that a behavior is innate?" The new work provides
concrete illustrations--in the form of computer simulations--of
properties of connectionist models that are particularly relevant to
cognitive development. This enables the reader to pursue in depth some
of the practical and empirical issues raised in the first book. The
authors' larger goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of neural network
modeling as a research methodology.

The book comes with a complete software package, including
demonstration projects, for running neural network simulations on both
Macintosh and Windows 95. It also contains a series of exercises in the
use of the neural network simulator provided with the book. The
software is also available to run on a variety of UNIX platforms.

Neural Network Modeling and Connectionism series 
MIT Press/Bradford Books
May 1997
ISBN 0-262-66105-5
254 pp.
$40.00 (paper)

MIT Press WWW page, with ordering information:
http://mitpress.mit.edu:8000/mitp/recent-books/cog/pluep.html