  One important trend has been the development of Connectionism as an alternative to the ‘Classical’ conception of the mind (Newell &amp; Simon 1976; see Garson 2010 for an overview). On the Classical view, the cognitive mind is best understood on the model of a digital computer that (i) uses symbolic representations that have a combinatorial syntax and semantics, and (ii) manipulates these representations following structure-sensitive processing rules. Connectionists replace the Classical view with a model of psychological processes as involving networks of simple units with weighted connections among the units that control the spread of activation through the network, and ‘learning’ algorithms for resetting the weights of the connections on the basis of earlier behavior of the network in response to some task. There is continuing debate about whether the Classical and Connectionist models are really incompatible, and some have argued that Connectionist systems are best viewed as implementations of classical symbol-based systems (see Pinker &amp; Prince 1988 for discussion). But the research on psychological processing within the Connectionist framework is very different from what one finds in the Classical tradition.