THEORETICAL CONTRIBUT ION What Do Connectionism and Social Psychology Offer Each Other?

Social psychologists can benefit from exploring connectionist or parallel distributed processing models of mental representation and process and also can contribute much to connectionist theory in return. Connectionist models involve many simple processing units that send activation signals over connections. At an abstract level, the models can be described as representing concepts (as distributed patterns of activation), operating like schemas to fill in typical values for input informa-tion, reconstructing memories based on accessible knowledge rather than retrieving static represen-tations, using flexible and context-sensitive concepts, and computing by satisfying numerous con-straints in parallel. This article reviews open questions regarding connectionist models and concludes that social psychological contributions to such topics as cognition-motivation nteractions may be important for the development of integrative connectionist models. Probably every social psychologist, paging through the gen-eral journals of psychology (such as Psychological Review or Psychological Science) or the cognitive journals (such as the various sections of the Journal of Experimental Psychology) has noted the frequent appearance of articles applying connection-ist or parallel distr ibuted processing (PDP) models. Connec-t ionism emerged as an intellectual movement in the early 1980s out of various earlier precursors ( including Rosenblatt, 1962, and Grossberg, 1976), and its matur i ty was marked by the 1986 publication of the two-volume "PDP bible " (McClel land, Rumelhart, et al., 1986; Rumelhart, McClelland, et al., 1986). Today connect ionism exerts a strong and growing influence in many areas of cognitive psychology, ranging from research on low-level visual perception to higher level processes such as lan-guage processing, categorization, and decision making. Like an earlier major transit ion in psychology--that from be-haviorism to information-processing cognitive models in the 1950s--the rise of the connectionist approach as been charac-terized as a scientific revolution or paradigm shift (Schneider, Preparation of this article was supported by Research Grant R0