Models of Cognition

Each of the eleven chapters in this volume discusses a different model of cognition ranging from image analysis through word recognition to communication failure in dialogue, and covers the spectrum of techniques from the purely symbolic to the purely connectionist. The first four chapters are seated firmly in the symbolic tradition. Chapters 3-5 all present psychological evidence directed towards particular models. The next three chapters are all partly connectionist. They present a planning model that is part symbolic and part connectionist, a model of frame selection, and the third takes syntactic parsing partly into the realms of connectionist research with simulated annealing. The final three chapers are firmly within the connectionist tradition. Chapter 9 presents an extentional programming approach to image analysis. Chapter 10 introduces a learning technique for the extraction of spatial informatoin from simple images and the final chapter includes a discussion of a central connectionist debate on whether to use distributed or localist representations.