James McClelland (psychologist)

James Lloyd " Jay" McClelland ( born December 1, 1948 in Cambridge ( Massachusetts)) is an American psychologist who in the 1980s, a driving force in the cognitive sciences was ( connectionism, parallel distributed processing ).

Life and work

McClelland studied psychology at Columbia University (Bachelor 1970) and in 1975 received his doctorate with a thesis in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was an assistant professor from 1974 and from 1980 Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD ), where he worked with David Rumelhart. 1982 to 1984 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1984 he was an associate professor and from 1985 professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also simultaneously in the faculty of computer science was from 1987 ( and from 2000 in the Faculty of Biology ) board and 1989/ 1990, the Faculty of Psychology. In 2001 he was there University professor and from 2002 Walter Van Dyke Bingham Professor in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. 1995 to 2006 he was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. He is since 2006 Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University and Chairman of the Department of Psychology. He is the Director of The Center for Mind, Brain and Computation:

In the early 1980s he developed with David Rumelhart and other computer programs that simulated neural network- based processes in object perception and learning. The book Parallel Distributed Processing with Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group, 1986 was very influential.

1991/2, he was president of the Cognitive Science Society. 2010/2011 he was president of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences the. He was editor of Cognitive Science.

Awards (selection)

In 1993, McClelland, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, 2001 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, 2002, IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and the 2005 Mind- Brain- Prize of the University of Turin. He became an honorary doctorate at the Free University of Brussels, 2005, 2010, he received the Rumelhart Prize and in 2014 the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.

He is a member ( Fellow ) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 1993), the American Psychological Society ( 1996) and the National Academy of Sciences ( 2001).

Writings (selection )

• With Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group, Parallel distributed processing - explorations in the microstructure of cognition, 2 volumes, MIT Press 1986
• With Rumelhart Explorations in parallel distributed processing: a handbook of models, programs, and exercises, MIT Press 1988
• With TT Rogers Semantic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach, MIT Press 2004