Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper contains some modifications to Back Propagation that aim to remove one of its failings without sacrificing power. Adaptively Parametrised Error Correcting Systems ( APECS ) are shown not to suffer from the sequential learning problem, and to be capable of solving EOR , higher order parity, and negation problems. This opens the w a y to development of connectionist models of associative learning and memory that do not suffer from "catastrophic interference", and may shed light on issues such as the episodic / semantic memory distinction.