| 1 | Name: | Dr. James L. McClelland | |
| Institution: | Stanford University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2008 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 305 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1948 | ||
James L. (Jay) McClelland received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He served on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, where he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He was a founding co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2006 he moved to Stanford University, where he is now Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Chair of the Department of Psychology, and the founding director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation. Over his career, McClelland has contributed to both the experimental and theoretical literatures in a number of areas, most notably in the application of connectionist/ parallel distributed processing/ neural network models to problems in perception, cognitive development, language learning, and the neurobiology of memory. Together with David E. Rumelhart he led the group that produced, in 1986, the two volume book Parallel Distributed Processing, laying out a neurally inspired framework for cognitive modeling and applying it to a wide range of topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. McClelland and Rumelhart jointly received the 1993 Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 1996 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2001 Garwemeyer Prize in Psychology, and the 2002 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award for their pioneering work in this area. In 2014, he shared the NAS Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences with Elizabeth Shilin Spelke. McClelland has served as senior editor of Cognitive Science, as president of the Cognitive Science Society, and as a member of the National Advisory Mental Health Council. He is currently president-elect of the Federation of the Psychological, Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has received the APS William James Fellow Award for lifetime contributions to the basic science of psychology. McClelland currently teaches cognitive neuroscience and conducts research on learning, memory, conceptual development, spoken language, decision making, and semantic cognition. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |||