James McClelland

James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland (born December 1, 1948 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) is an American psychologist who was a driving force in cognitive science ( connectionism , parallel distributed processing) in the 1980s .

Live and act

McClelland studied psychology at Columbia University (Bachelor 1970) and received his doctorate in 1975 with a thesis in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania . He was Assistant Professor from 1974 and Associate Professor from 1980 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he worked with David Rumelhart . From 1982 to 1984 he was also visiting scholar at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1984 he was Associate Professor and from 1985 Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University , where he was at the same time in the Faculty of Computer Science from 1987 (and in the Faculty of Biology from 2000) and in 1989/1990 headed the Faculty of Psychology. From 2001 he was University Professor there and from 2002 Walter Van Dyke Bingham Professor in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience . From 1995 to 2006 he was also an adjunct professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh . He has been Lucie Stern Professor in Social Sciences at Stanford University and Head of the Faculty of Psychology since 2006 . There he is director of the Center of Mind, Brain and Computation :

At the beginning of the 1980s, he and David Rumelhart and others developed computer programs that simulated processes in object perception and learning based on neural networks. The 1986 book Parallel Distributed Processing with Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group was very influential.

In 1991/2 he was President of the Cognitive Science Society. In 2010/2011 he was President of the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He was the editor of Cognitive Science .

Awards (selection)

In 1993 McClelland received the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists , in 2001 the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology , in 2002 the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and in 2005 the Mind-Brain Prize from the University of Turin . In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels , in 2010 he received the Rumelhart Prize and in 2014 both the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and the AH-Heineken Prize in Cognitive Science .

He is a member (Fellow) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1993), the American Psychological Society (1996), the National Academy of Sciences (2001), the American Philosophical Society (2008) and the British Academy (2017).

Fonts (selection)

• with David E. Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group: Parallel distributed processing. Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. 2 volumes (Vol. 1: Foundations. Vol. 2: Psychological and biological models. ). MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1986, ISBN 0-262-18123-1 .
• with David E. Rumelhart: Explorations in parallel distributed processing. A handbook of models, programs, and exercises. MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1988, ISBN 0-262-63113-X .
• with Timothy T. Rogers: Semantic cognition. A parallel distributed processing approach. MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 2004, ISBN 0-262-18239-4 .

Web links

• Web site in Stanford

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: James L. McClelland. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 16, 2018 . 
2. ^ Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research. British Academy , July 21, 2017, accessed July 21, 2017 . 
3. ↑ Parallel distributed processing