James Lloyd (Jay) McClelland (born in Cambridge, MA, USA December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he is currently the Chair of the Psychology Department. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. 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 1980s, 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 a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years, and himself received the award in 2010 at the Cognitive Science Society Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon.
In Fall of 2006, he moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.