From one perspective, the renewal of interest in connectionism and neural modeling was a natural step in the endeavor to elaborate abstract notions of cognitive content and functioning to the point where they can make testable contact with brain theory and neuroscience. But it can also be seen as a paradigm shift, to the extent that the focus on subsymbolic processing began to be linked to a growing skepticism concerning higher-level symbolic processing as models of mind, of the sort associated with earlier semantic network-based and rule-based architectures. For example, Ramsay et al. (1991)  argued that the demonstrated capacity of connectionist models to perform cognitively interesting tasks undermined the then-prevailing view of the mind as a physical symbol system. But others have continued to defend the essential role of symbolic processing. For example, Anderson (1983, 1993) contended that while theories of symbolic thought need to be grounded in neurally plausible processing, and while subsymbolic processes are well-suited for exploiting the statistical structure of the environment, nevertheless understanding the interaction of these subsymbolic processes required a theory of representation and behavior at the symbolic level.