Putting knowledge in its place: A scheme for programming parallel processing structures on the fly

This paper introduces a mechanism called CID. the Connection Information Distributor. CID extends connectionism by providing 0 way to program net-works of simple processing elements on line, in response to processing demands. Without CIO. simultaneous processing of several patterns has only been possible by prewiring- multiple copies of the network needed t.o process one pattern at a time. With CID. programmable processing structures can be loaded with connection information stored centrally, as needed. To illustrate some of the characteristics of the scheme, a CID version of the interactive ac-tivation model of word recognition is described. The model has a single per-manent representation of the connection information required for word perception, but it allows several words to be processed simultaneously in separate programmable networks. Multiword processing is not perfect, how-ever. The model produces the same kinds of intrusion errors that human sub-jects make in processing brief presentations of word-pairs, such as SAND LANE (SAND is often misreported as LAND "r SANE). The resource require-ments of the mechanism, in terms of nodes and connections, are found to be quite moderate. primarily because networks that are programmed in. response to task demand&ccan be much smaller than networks that have knowledge of large numbers of patterns built in