Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connectionist models have traditionally ignored conscious rule aplication in learning and performance.Conceptual problems arise in treating rule application in a connectionist framework because the level of analysis ofconnectionist models is lower than that which is natural for describing conscious rules. An analysis is offered of the relation between these two levels of description, and of the kind of reduction involved in connectionist modeling.From this vantagepoint an approach is formulated to the treatment of conscious rule application within aconnectionist framewwk. The approach crucially involves connectionist language processing, and leads to adistinction between two types of knowledge that can be stored in connectionist systems.