Page 64 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing 63

Figure 4.3
The arborizations of about 1 percent of the neurons near a vertical slice through the cerebral
cortex.Thefullheightofthe figurecorresponds to thethickness of thecortex, whichisinthis
instance about 2 mm.(From Mechanics of the Mind, p.84, by C. Blakemore, 1977, Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.Copyright 1977 by Cambridge University Press.Reprinted
with permission.)

hypothesis about the identity of a word, for example, is itself distributed in the
activations of a large number of units.

PDP Models: Cognitive Science or Neuroscience?
One reason for the appeal of PDP models is their obvious ‘‘physiological’’ fla-
vor: They seem so much more closely tied to the physiology of the brain than
are other kinds of information-processing models.The brain consists of a
large number of highly interconnected elements (figure 4.3) which apparently
send very simple excitatory and inhibitory messages to each other and update
theirexcitations on thebasis of thesesimplemessages.Thepropertiesofthe
units in many PDP models were inspired by basic properties of the neural
hardware.
Though the appeal of PDP models is definitely enhanced by their physiolog-
ical plausibility and neural inspiration, these are not the primary bases for their
appeal to us.We are, after all, cognitive scientists, and PDP models appeal to
us for psychological and computational reasons.They hold out the hope of
offering computationally sufficient and psychologically accurate mechanistic
accounts of the phenomena of human cognition which have eluded successful
explication in conventional computational formalisms; and they have radically