Jay Mcclelland

Biography

James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA (born December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and 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 large increase in scientific interest for connectionism in the 1980s.

Research Interest

His research addresses topics in perception and decision making; learning and memory; language and reading; semantic cognition; and cognitive development. He view cognition as emerging from distributed processing activity of neural populations, with learning occurring through the adaptation of connections among neurons. A new focus of research in the laboratory is mathematical cognition, with an emphasis on the learning and representation of mathematical concepts and relationships.