Organization and Emergence of Semantic Knowledge: A Parallel-Distributed Processing Approach

How do you know that Socrates is mortal? More generally, how do you know what properties to attribute to an object? How is the relevant knowledge acquired? How is the knowledge organized in the brain, and how is it affected by brain damage? My colleagues and I have been seeking to answer such questions by developing computational models of semantic cognition and its development. Parallel-Distributed Processing Our overall framework relies on an approach to semantic cognition first suggested by Hinton (1981). Hinton’s proposal was that our knowledge of the properties of objects as expressed in propositions about them, such as ‘A canary can fly’, is not stored directly in propositional form but in the strengths of connections between simple processing units that allow propositions to be formed mentally b