Psychological studies of symbolic processing and parallel distributed processing

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The hypothesis of the project of our research was that human problem solving which tends to be regarded to be executed by symbolic processes are actually executed by parallel distributed processes in our brains. To testify the hypothesis, the project aimed to investigate the difference between the internal representations of symbolic processes and those of parallel distributed processes and to contrast concurrent information processes and successive information processes. The results of the project, composed of four groups ; the mathematical group, the perception group, the cognition group, and the behavior group, are as follows.The mathematical group constructed an auto-regression model for the information processing of motion perception, compared an artificial inference system organized with Prolog and a human inference system, and investigated a genetic algorithm, which is a fundamental model of human information processing.The perception group identified glutamic acid as a chemical transmitter between retinal bipolar cells and retinal ganglion cells.The cognition group simulated some abilities of human problem solving by a PDP model which included the intuitive understanding of the rule of free-fall objects and the formulation of a law of physics.The experiment of the behavior group was to analyze the problem solving of macaque monkeys which made GO/NO-GO responses to stimuli with relevant dimensions varied frequently and to investigate the brain units of the monkeys associated with the stimulus-response relations.