The neural computational approach to cognitive and psychological processes is relatively new. However, Neural Computation and Psychology Workshops (NCPW), first held 16 years ago, lie at the heart of this fast-moving discipline, thanks to its interdisciplinary nature ??? bringing together researchers from different disciplines such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, philosophy and psychology to discuss their work on models of cognitive processes. Once again, the Eleventh Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW11), held in 2008 at the University of Oxford (England), reflects the interdisciplinary nature and wide range of backgrounds of this field. This volume is a collection of peer-reviewed contributions of most of the papers presented at NCPW11 by researchers from four continents and 15 countries.

Exploring Cognition: Damaged Brains and Neural Networks analyses the contribution made by cognitive neuropsychology and connectionist modelling to theoretical explanations of cognitive processes. Bringing together evidence from both damaged brains and neural networks, this exciting and innovative approach leads to re-evaluation of traditional theories: connectionist models lesioned to mimic the residual function of the damaged brain and rehabilitated to simulate the process of recovery suggest underlying mechanisms and challenge previous interpretations.
In this reader key articles by leading international researchers are combined with linking commentaries that provide a context, highlight the conceptual themes and evaluate the evidence. Carefully selected to include hotly debated topics, the papers cover, among others, the controversies surrounding explanations for category specificity in object recognition and for covert recognition of faces and words; the mechanisms underlying the use of regular and irregular past tenses; and the reading of regularly and irregularly spelled words. The challenges posed by connectionist models to assumptions about the nature of dissociations, the need for symbolic rule-based operations in language processing and the modularity and localisation of processes are assessed.
Exploring Cognition: Damaged Brains and Neural Networks will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience.

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Connectionism is a way of modelling what the brain does, based on the way that the brain does it. This book describes the principles of connectionist modelling, and the application of these models to understanding how the brain produces speech, forms memories, recognizes faces, and how intellect develops and deteriorates after brain damage. The book contains software for the tlearn connectionist simulator that is user-friendly and will run on either Macs or PCs.

This book is the companion volume to "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development" (The MIT Press, 1996), which proposed a new theoretical framework to answer the question "What does it mean to say that a behavior is innate?" The new work provides concrete illustrations -- in the form of computer simulations -- of properties of connectionist models that are particularly relevant to cognitive development. This enables the reader to pursue in depth some of the practical and empirical issues raised in the first book. The authors' larger goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of neural network modeling as a research methodology.

The book comes with a complete software package, including demonstration projects, for running neural network simulations on both Macintosh and Windows 95. It also contains a series of exercises in the use of the neural network simulator provided with the book. The software is also available to run on a variety of UNIX platforms.