The Connectionist Theory Of Cognitive Psychology: An Extensive Study

On the basis of previous studies and with the help of plenty of literatures in English, Coimectionism, a new theoretical paradigm in cognitive psychology, is introduced and studied objectively and systematically in order to illustrate its basic theory and pursue its background.Borne with cognitive psychology, connectionism is another paradigm of cognitive psychology. It is a synthesis of philosophy, computer science, neural science, cybernetics and psychology etc, and it represents the new development of cognitive psychology in recent years. With" mental activity acting as brain "as its metaphor and structure and function simulating, mass reductionism as its methodology, connectionism discovers the nature of cognition by studying various models of brain. Compared with the theory of symbol processing, connectionism is more appropriate in explaining the nature of cognition. In its studies, connectionism emphasizes the mass activity of the neural network and the role of connected weight, and probes deeply the problems of sensory, vision, learning, memory, language, cognitive disorder etc. The relevant materials has been analyzed and studied in detail in the dissertatioa As a result, it is believed that although connectionism has some plausibility in neurology, psychology and methodology, it still has some limitations compared with the real cognition.In the end, the key problem with which connectionism and symbol processing argued has been studied extensively, and the future development of connectionism has been predicted. In author' opinion, the integration of connectionism and symbol processing might be the future of connectionism and cognitive psychology.