This is a request for an Independent Scientist Award (K02). The applicant's immediate goals are to continue developing his knowledge and skills in connectionist (or parallel distributed processing) models in general, and applying those models within social psychology. This work fits within his long-term career goal of building integrative theory of mental representations and processes within social psychology. The career development plan involv3es building knowledge and skills related to connectionist models through relevant books, journals, and conferences; continuing to work with computer simulations of connectionist models applied to social psychological topics; and improving the accessibility of connectionist modeling for social psychologists in general. This work will take place at Purdue University, an extremely supportive training environment that offers access to numerous researchers with relevant expertise. The research plan is to continue developing and testing connectionist models with social psychology. The models' predictions, made precise and explicit by computer simulations, will be compared against results from existing studies in the field. When the models generate new predictions that have not yet been empirically tested, new laboratory studies of such predictions will be conducted; there are already several examples of new predictions that have not been confirmed by empirical test. Past and current research has related properties of connectionist models to memory for social schemas and exemplars, accessibility, heuristic- systematic and other related dual process models, stereotype learning and change, language and autobiographical memory, and flexibility of the self-concept and other knowledge representations. Planned work will continue in these areas and others including representation of attitudes, motivation and the affect-cognition interface, social interaction, and social influence. The overall goal of both training and research is to use connectionist models to generate new insights into core social psychological phenomena, incorporating social psychology within the new wave of theoretical integration that appears to be building across all of psychology through the common theoretical language of connectionist models.
