A Brief History of Connectionism and Its Psychological Implications

  • Stephen F. Walker
Chapter
Part of the Artificial Intelligence and Society book series (HCS)

Abstract

It would be possible to be fairly brief by defining connectionism as computational theories of neural networks — although it is conventional to acknowledge pioneers such as Hebb (1949) and Rosenblatt (1962), most of the impetus behind this form of connectionism has built up in the last ten years (Hinton and Anderson 1981; McClelland et al. 1986; cf. Anderson and Rosenfeld 1988; Papert 1988). My intention here, however, is to look at a selection of what might be called precursors to connectionism, mainly psychologists between 1850 and 1950 who espoused views which I shall claim had significant elements in common with the current approach.

Keywords

Pavlovian Conditioning Cognitive Architecture Spinal Reflex Psychological Implication Hebb Rule 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Springer-Verlag London Limited 1992

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  • Stephen F. Walker

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