In Mark Johnson (Ed.), Brain development and cognition: A reader (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. CONNECTIONISM AND THE STUDY OF CHANGE

Developmental psychology and developmental neuropsychology have traditionally focused on the study of children. But these two fields are also supposed to be about the study of change, i.e. changes in behavior, changes in the neural structures that underlie behavior, and changes in the relationship between mind and brain across the course of development. Ironically, there has been relatively little interest in the mechanisms responsible for change in the last 15–20 years of developmental research. The reasons for this de-emphasis on change have a great deal to do with a metaphor for mind and brain that has influenced most of experimental psychology, cognitive science and neuropsychology for the last few decades, i.e. the metaphor of the serial digital computer. We will refer to this particular framework for the study of mind as the First Computer Metaphor, to be contrasted with a new computer metaphor, variously known as connectionism, parallel distributed processing, and/or neural networks. In this brief chapter, we will argue that the First Computer Metaphor has had some particularly unhappy consequences for the study of mental and neural development. By contrast, the Second Computer Metaphor (despite its current and no doubt future limitations) offers some compelling advantages for the study of change, at both the mental and the neural level. The chapter is organized as follows: (1) a brief discussion of the way that change has (or has not) been treated in the last decade of research in developmental psychology, (2) a discussion of the First Computer Metaphor, and its implications for developmental research, (3) an introduction to the Second Computer Metaphor, and the promise it offers for research on the develop-ment of mind and brain, ending with (4) a response to some common misconceptions about connectionism.