connectionism

[kuh-nek-shuh-niz-uhm]

noun

Psychology.

1. the theory that all mental processes can be described as the operation of inherited or acquired bonds between stimulus and response.

connectionism

/ kəˈnɛkʃənɪzəm /

noun

1. psychol the theory that the connections between brain cells mediate thought and govern behaviour

Word History and Origins

Origin of connectionism¹

connection + -ism

Example Sentences

Classical AI research—particularly the branch known as connectionism, the basis for artificial neural networks—adheres to the outside-in, tabula rasa model.

Read more on Scientific American

These ideas remained popular, however, among philosophers and psychologists, who called it “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing.”

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He covers the alternate paradigms that gave rise to machine learning in the middle of the 20th century, the “connectionism” field’s fall from grace in the 1960s, and its eventual resurrection and surpassing of traditional A.I. paradigms in the 1980s to the present.

Read more on Slate

Domingos divides the field into five contemporary machine-learning paradigms—evolutionary algorithms, connectionism and neural networks, symbolism, Bayes networks, and analogical reasoning—which he imagines being unified in one future “master algorithm” capable of learning nearly anything.

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The next turn came in more recent decades as a cross-disciplinary group of researchers, including Seung, hit on a new way of thinking that is described as connectionism.

Read more on New York Times