Connectionism

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Introduction

Connectionism is an approach toward modeling cognition that assumes individual cognitions are related to each other through a network structure. It is also sometimes called an artificial neural network. Its popularity in cognitive psychology has been gaining recently, but has not caught on to the same extent in social psychology. In cognitive psychology it has been used to model elementary memory processes, and also more complex problems like language acquisition.

Implementation

Implementation of connectionist theories is done by constructing a network, labeling each node with a different cognition. Nodes can be connected to all other nodes or only some of them in a structured fashion. It is often associated with computational modeling.

References

• Ellis, R., & Humphreys, G. (1999). Connectionist Psychology, Psychology Press. ISBN:0863777872
  • good introduction and general reference for cognitive psychology
• Read, S.J., & Miller, L.C. (1998). Connectionist Models of Scial Reasoning and Social Behavior, Earlbaum. ISBN:0805822151
  • reference for modeling that has been done in social psychology
• Smith, E.R. (1996). What do connectionism and social psychology offer each other? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 893-912.
  • good introduction to connectionism in the context of social psychology
• a search of your libary's catalog should turn up several useful references as well.