James McClelland (psychologist)
American psychologist
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Through Psychology, Connectionism and Speech recognition
Early life and education
McClelland was born on December 1, 1948, to Walter Moore and Frances (Shaffer) McClelland. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He married Heidi Marsha Feldman on May 6, 1978, and has two daughters.
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Career
In 1986 McClelland published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition with David Rumelhart, which some still regard as a bible for cognitive scientists. Geoffrey Hinton was a member of the PDP group. McClelland present work focuses on learning, memory processes, and psycholinguistics, still within the framework of connectionist models. He is a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years, and himself received the award in 2010 at the Cognitive Science Society Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon.
McClelland and David Rumelhart are known for their debate with Steven Pinker and Alan Prince regarding the necessity of a language-specific learning module.
In fall 2006 McClelland moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
Awards
- Mind & Brain Prize
- University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in psychology, 2002
- William W. Cumming prize from Columbia University, 1970
- Research Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, 1981—86, 1987—97
- Fellow, National Science Foundation, 1970—73
- Rumelhart Prize, 2010
- C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize, 2014
In July 2017, McClelland was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.