James McClelland

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For other people of this name, see James McClelland (disambiguation)

James L. (Jay) McClelland (born December 1, 1948) is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is best known for his work concerning Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models (or neural networks) to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the "connectionist revolution" of the 1980's, which saw a large increase in scientific interest for connectionism.

In 1986, he published Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition with David Rumelhart, which some still regard as a bible for cognitive scientists. His present work focuses on learning, memory processes and psycholinguistics, still within the framework of connectionist models. He is also the chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having colloborated with Rumelhart for many years.

In Fall of 2006, he moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.