Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We have developed principles integrating connectionist and symbolic computation by establishing mathematical relationships between two levels of description of a single computational system: at the lower level, the system is formally described in terms of highly distributed patterns of activity over connectionist units, and the dynamics of these units; at the higher level, the same system is formally described by symbolic structures and symbol manipulation. In this pa- per, w e propose a specific treatment of recur- sion where complex symbolic operations on re- cursive structures are mapped to massively par- allel manipulation of distributed representations in a connectionist network.