Last updated September 28, 2010

Jay McClelland's Rumelhart Prize Lecture on the Emergence of Semantic Cognition

At the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in August, 2010, I received the Rumelhart Prize and delivered the Rumelhart Prize Lecture. The Video below includes the ceremonial events including the presentation of the prize, followed by the lecture itself, which in turn contains an exurpt from a lecture by Rumelhart introducing the PDP framework in a talk at Stanford in 1987. My lecture begins just about 13 minutes into the recording, available here.

Two other events related to the Rumelhart Prize occurred at the Cognitive Science society meeting. One was the Rumelhart Prize Symposium, organized by my former student Tim Rogers, featuring four outstanding speakers including Tim speaking about topics related to several themes I have stressed in my work: Graded activation, interactive processing, and distributed representation. The other was a special symposium featuring the first 10 Rumelhart prize winners discussing outstanding questions in cognitive science. The symposium features another clip of Rumelhart himself speaking about what the thought, in 1987, were the future issues that needed to be addressed in the Parallel Distributed Processing framework. These items can all be found on The Science Network, along with interviews of many of the Rumelhart Prize Winners and other leaders in the field of Cognitive Science.