James McClelland, a cognitive psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, will share the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Psychology for his role in developing computer techniques that enable brain scientists to realistically simulate the way people think.
McClelland and David Rumelhart of Stanford University are credited with pioneering the field of parallel distributed processing in the mid-1980s.
"That has been a major, major development in cognitive science," said Gordon Bower, a distinguished professor and former chairman of psychology at Stanford. "I can think of few other people in psychology who are more deserving of such an award than these two."
This is only the second year that the psychology prize has been awarded by the Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville.
McClelland, who is on sabbatical leave in London, is co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. He has joint appointments in psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon, where he was elected a university professor this year. He also is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Pitt.
McClelland and Rumelhart began collaborating when both were on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, more than two decades ago. They explored connectionism -- the idea that brain cells work together collectively to process information -- and worked on neural networks, computer programs that were intended to simulate that method of information processing.
Neural nets were popular among brain researchers in the 1960s, but fell out of favor because they were too simplistic to simulate realistic thought processes, Bower said. But McClelland and Rumelhart found a way to develop more sophisticated neural nets. Specifically, they developed a method, called back propagation, that could be used to correct and fine-tune these computer models.
"It was like opening the flood gates," Bower said. These computer models have since been used extensively to develop and test theories of how the brain learns, how it recognizes spoken language and how visual perception takes place.
McClelland, who joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1984, has since concentrated on questions relating to perception. At Stanford, Rumelhart concentrated on learning problems.
Bower noted that the Grawemeyer prize is bittersweet in the case of Rumelhart, who suffers from Pick's disease, a degenerative disorder similar to Alzheimer's disease that forced him to take medical leave several years ago.
McClelland lives in Point Breeze. He and his wife, Dr. Heidi Feldman, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital, have two daughters.
