
The Adaline: linear functions and gradient based learning This was a big leap forward from the perspective of modeling cognitive systems, which as we know have the capacity to learn via environmental feedback. Having a learning procedure completely changes the nature of the system from one based on explicit human design to one based on self-organization principles. It was also closely inspired by the scientific knowledge about neuroscience from the time.Īrguably, the most important innovation was the introduction of a learning procedure: delta rule learning or "error-corrective learning" (Rosenblatt, 1961). The Perceptron incorporated multiple neurons, with complex connectivity patterns, and the ability to process both binary and real-valued inputs. The Perceptron: multiple neurons and learningĪ single neuron architecture with no learning procedures as the McCulloch-Pitts neuron definitively leaves a lot of space for improvement, considering that the human brain has over 86 billion neurons hierarchically organized into multiple layers of very complex connectivity patterns (Azevedo et al., 2009).įrank Rosenblatt (1958) introduced the so-called "Perceptron" in 1958. All things considered, McCulloch and Pitts planted the seeds for the future development of the field. As binary systems, the application domain was essentially restricted to logic, although you can easily envision other applications with binary input-output relationships. No learning algorithm was implemented, which means that the solution has to be figured out by the modeler. Only binary inputs and binary outputs are allowed. This model was extremely simple in its architecture, which is perfect as building-block for more complex models: a single neuron, with a single layer, where each input has a single link to the output. We begin the journey with the McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron (McCulloch & Pitts, 1943), which is probably the first published neuron-based model of cognition. The McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron: single neurons and logic gates Vision, Video, Time-series, Grid-like data Note: "Real-valued" includes "Binary" values by definition. Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics that we will reference in this roadmap. Everything will be explained at length later. Keep in mind this is not a comprehensive review, that is left for each chapter, and some concepts may be obscure at this point. We will cover all the major architectural design traits of each model, like activations functions and learning procedure, but paying particular attention to what was novel or unique about them at the time they were introduced to the field.

There are multiple ways to characterize neural network models. In particular, this roadmap will help you to understand why I selected these models, why they are important to the field, and how they connect to each other from a historical and technical perspective.

In this section, I briefly expand on this perspective and lay out a "roadmap" to what comes next in this series.

This e-book is precisely about this approach to cognition.

In the introductory chapter, I mentioned connectionist models as one of the main approaches in the computational cognitive modeling landscape.
