Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 1, Issue 6, September 1997, Pages 222-228
Journal home page for Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Review
Connectionist models of neuropsychological disorders

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01072-3Get rights and content

Artificial neural networks (‘connectionist models’) embody aspects of real neuronal systems. But does studying the breakdown of performance in such models help us to understand cognitive impairments in humans following brain damage? Here we review recent attempts to capture different neuropsychological disorders using connectionist models with simulated lesions. We show how such lesion studies can be used to evaluate some of the standard assumptions made in neuropsychological research, concerning both double dissociations and associations between patterns of impairment. We also illustrate how lesioned models, like humans, can sometimes be more impaired on the easier of two tasks and demonstrate that connectionist models can incorporate forms of internal structure. Finally we discuss the utility of the models for understanding and predicting the effectiveness of different rehabilitation strategies. Future questions concern the role and possible development of internal structure within these models, whether the models can be generalized to larger-scale simulations, and whether they can accommodate higher-order linguistic disorders.

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      Citation Excerpt :

      The structure of the saliency map model, and it’s inspiration in the hierarchical organization of the visual field, raises an interesting additional possibility: if some agnosias arise from a selective impairment in a particular type of feature, then their attentional behaviour might be better accounted for by adjusting the weights of the different features in the model. Simulating the disruption of different cognitive abilities by “lesioning” connectionist models has proven a useful tool in neuropsychology and artificial intelligence (see Olson & Humphreys, 1997, for a review), and here we sought similar insights by selectively tuning the saliency model based on observed behavioural deficits. As a proof of principle, we reanalyzed CH’s fixations on scenes during the view-and-remember task, varying the contribution of the three different feature channels that went into calculating visual saliency.

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    • Computational models of visual selective attention: A review

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