ABSTRACT
In recent years, and particularly following the publication of the influential two-volume work by McClelland, Rumelhart, and their colleagues (McClelland, Rumelhart, & the PDP Research Group, 1986; Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research Group, 1986), parallel distributed processing or connectionist models have had a strong and growing influence in many areas of cognitive psychology. Connectionist models have been developed for phenomena ranging from low-level visual and auditory perception to higherlevel processes such as language processing, categorization, schema use, memory, and decision making. Many of these higher-level processes are also prominent in theoretical accounts of social psychological phenomena, such as person perception and stereotyping. In this article we argue that connectionist models can shed new light on important social psychological phenomena, as they have on various areas of non-social cognition.
