An introduction to learning

At a symbolic level cognition can be modelled as a production system where meaning units are represented as condition-action rules. Anderson (1982, 1987) provides a good example of how learning can occur with this type of knowledge representation. At a subsymbolic level cognition can be modelled with a connectionist network where meaning units are represented as patterns of parallel distributed activity. The work of the McClelland and Rumelhart (1986) group is a prototype of this approach. We elaborate on these two approaches to learning and contrast the symbolic search space paradigm with the connectionist paradigm.