Parallel Distributed Processing

What makes people smarter than machines? They certainly are not quicker or more precise. Yet people are far better at perceiving objects in natural scenes and noting their relations , at understanding language and retrieving contextually appropriate information from memory, at making plans and carrying out contextually appropriate actions , and at a wide range of other natural cognitive .tasks. People are also far better at learning to do these things more accurately and fluently through processing experience. What is the basis for these differences? One answer, perhaps the classic one we might expect from artificial intelligence , is " software." If we only had the right computer program, the argument goes , we might be able to capture the fluidity and adaptability of human information proceSSIng. Certainly this answer is partially correct. There have been great breakthroughs in our understanding of cognition as a result of the development of expressive highlevel computer languages and powerful algorithms. No doubt there will be more such breakthroughs in the