Putting Knowledge in its Place: A Scheme for Programming Parallel Processing Structures on the Fly

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This paper introduces a mechanism called CID, the Connection Information Distributor. CID extends connectionism by providing a way to program networks of simple processing elements on line, in response to processing demands. Without CID, simultaneous processing of several patterns has only been possible by prewiring multiple copies of the network needed to process one pattern at a time. With CID, programmable processing structures can be loaded with connection information stored centrally, as needed. To illustrate some of the characteristics of the scheme, a CID version of the interactive activation model of word recognition is described. The model has a single permanent representation of the connection information required for word perception, but it allows several words to be processed simultaneously in separate programmable networks. Multiword processing is not perfect, however. The model produces the same kinds of intrusion errors that human subjects make in processing brief presentations of word‐pairs, such as SAND LANE (SAND is often misreported as LAND or SANE). The resource requirements of the mechanism, in terms of nodes and connections, are found to be quite moderate, primarily because networks that are programmed in response to task demands can be much smaller than networks that have knowledge of large numbers of patterns built in.