Connectionist models have demonstrated capacity to perform cognitively interesting tasks

From one perspective, the renewal of interest in connectionism and neural modeling was a natural step in the endeavor to elaborate abstract notions of cognitive content and functioning to the point where they can make testable contact with brain theory and neuroscience. But it can also be seen as a paradigm shift, to the extent that the focus on subsymbolic processing began to be linked to a growing skepticism concerning higher-level symbolic processing as models of mind, of the sort associated