Connectionism: past,present, and future

Research efforts to study computation and cognitive modeling on neurally-inspired mechanisms have come to be called Connectionism. Rather than being brand new, it is actually the rebirth of a research programme which thrived from the 40s through the 60s and then was severely retrenched in the 70s. Connectionism is often posed as a paradigmatic competitor to the Symbolic Processing tradition of Artificial Intelligence (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988), and, indeed, the counterpoint in the timing of their intellectual and commercial fortunes may lead one to believe that research in cognition is merely a zero-sum game. This paper surveys the history of the field, often in relation to AI, discusses its current successes and failures, and makes some predictions for where it might lead in the future.