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James L. McClelland

James L. McClelland is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation at Stanford University. He is the coauthor of Parallel Distributed Processing (1986) and Semantic Cognition (2004), both published by the MIT Press.

Titles by This Author

Semantic Cognition

A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach
By Timothy T. Rogers and James L. McClelland

This groundbreaking monograph offers a mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge, integrating the strengths and overcoming many of the weaknesses of hierarchical, categorization-based approaches, similarity-based approaches, and the approach often called "theory theory." Building on earlier models by Geoffrey Hinton in the 1980s and David Rumelhart in the early 1990s, the authors propose that performance in semantic tasks arises through the propagation of graded signals in a system of interconnected processing units.

Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing - Macintosh version

A Handbook of Models, Programs, and Exercises
By James L. McClelland and David E. Rumelhart


Includes 2 diskettes (for the Macintosh)

Parallel Distributed Processing

Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition: Psychological and Biological Models
By James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart and PDP Research Group

What makes people smarter than computers? These volumes by a pioneering neurocomputing group suggest that the answer lies in the massively parallel architecture of the human mind. They describe a new theory of cognition called connectionism that is challenging the idea of symbolic computation that has traditionally been at the center of debate in theoretical discussions about the mind.

Parallel Distributed Processing

Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition: Foundations
By David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland and PDP Research Group

What makes people smarter than computers? These volumes by a pioneering neurocomputing group suggest that the answer lies in the massively parallel architecture of the human mind. They describe a new theory of cognition called connectionism that is challenging the idea of symbolic computation that has traditionally been at the center of debate in theoretical discussions about the mind.

Titles by This Editor

The Memory Process

Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives
Edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews and James L. McClelland

The Memory Process offers a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of human memory, with contributions from both neuroscientists and humanists. The first book to link the neuroscientific study of memory to the investigation of memory in the humanities, it connects the latest findings in memory research with insights from philosophy, literature, theater, art, music, and film.

Attention and Performance XVI

Information Integration in Perception and Communication
Edited by Inui Toshio and James L. McClelland


The contributions to this volume, the sixteenth in the prestigious Attention and Performance series, revisit the issue of modularity, the idea that many functions are independently realized in specialized, autonomous modules.