1. CONNECTIONIST MODELLING
CAT
Has fur
purrs
Likes tuna

2. CONNECTIONIST MODELLING
ANIMALS
Vertebrates
Amphibians Fish Mammals Birds Reptiles
CAT
Has fur
purrs
Likes tuna

3. Notion of Cognitive Economy
alive sleeps reproduces eats
Animal
Vertebrate
Birds
Mammals
Robin Penguin Cat
has a spine
fly lay eggs feathered
have milk live young have hair

4. Evidence FOR Evidence AGAINST Sentence verification speed:
- quicker to verify across fewer levels of hierarchy (Schwartz & Reisberg, 1991)
Evidence AGAINST
Prototypicality effect – a robin is a bird; a penguin is a bird
Familiarity effect – a cat is an animal; a cat is a mammal

5. Notion of Cognitive Economy
alive sleeps reproduces eats
Animal
Vertebrate
Birds
Mammals
Robin Penguin Cat
has a spine
fly lay eggs feathered
have milk live young have hair

6. Resolution: The Development of Connectionist Models (Collins & Loftus, 1973)
Abandon hierarchy
Introduce concept of strong and weak links
Strong = familiarity/prototypical exemplars
Weak = unfamiliar/non-prototypical exemplars

7. Bruce and Young (1986): Information Processing Model
View-Centred Descriptions
Expression Analysis
Structural Encoding
Expression-Independent Descriptions
Facial Speech Analysis
Face Recognition Units
Directed Visual Processing
Person-Identity Nodes
“Cognitive System”
Name Generation

8. Burton, Bruce & Johnston, (1991): Interactive Activation and Competition Model
FRUs
‘tony’
‘paul’ ‘john’
‘bill’
SIUs
Singer politician British American Dead Alive President PM ‘Beetle’
NAMES
Bill Clinton
John Lennon Tony Blair
Paul McCartney

9. Burton, Bruce & Johnston, (1991): Interactive Activation and Competition Model
FRUs
‘tony’
‘paul’ ‘john’
‘bill’
SIUs
Singer politician British American Dead Alive President PM ‘Beetle’ +
NAMES
Bill Clinton
John Lennon Tony Blair
Paul McCartney
++++
+++ +

10. Burton, Bruce & Johnston, (1991): Interactive Activation and Competition Model
PROSOPAGNOSIA
‘tony’
‘paul’ ‘john’
‘bill’
SIUs
Singer politician British American Dead Alive President PM ‘Beetle’ +
NAMES
Bill Clinton
John Lennon Tony Blair
Paul McCartney
++++
+++ +
ANOMIA

11. SUMMARY: The Value of the Connectionist Approach
It offers a very powerful model of memory
It possesses cognitive economy
It possesses biological plausibility
It can model both intact memory and impaired memory
It can model simple semantic memory and more complex real-world memory
It provides a model of how information is stored and how it is retrieved.