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More on Grandmother Cells and the Biological Implausibility of PDP Models of Cognition: A Reply to Plaut and McClelland (2010) and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman (2010)

Plaut and McClelland (2010) and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman (2010) both challenged my characterization of localist and distributed representations. They also challenged the biological plausibility of grandmother cells on conceptual and empirical grounds. This reply addresses these issues in turn. The...

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Published in:Psychological Review Vol. 117; no. 1; pp. 300 - 307
Main Author: Bowers, Jeffrey S.
Format: Article
Published: American Psychological Association January 2010
Subjects:
Human information processing
Neurosciences
Neuropsychology
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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          Human information processing
          Neurosciences
          Neuropsychology
      ab: Plaut and McClelland (2010) and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman (2010) both challenged my characterization of localist and distributed representations. They also challenged the biological plausibility of grandmother cells on conceptual and empirical grounds. This reply addresses these issues in turn. The premise of my argument is that grandmother cells in neuroscience are the equivalent of localist representations in psychology. When defined in this way, grandmother cells are biologically plausible, given the neuroscience to date. By contrast, the neurophysiology is shown to be inconsistent with the distributed representations often learned in existing parallel distributed processing (PDP) models, and it poses a challenge to PDP theories more generally.
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