Jay McClelland

McClelland was born in Cambridge, in the United States, on December 1, 1948.⁠[1]

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry in 1970 and a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry in 1975.⁠[2]

He became an assistant professor of psychology at UC San Diego in 1974 and an associate professor in 1980.⁠[3]

After reading a paper by Rumelhart he began collaborating with him, aiming to build a neural network model capturing features of how the brain perceives letters; he said he was never thinking about building an AI.⁠[4]

His friendship with Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey HintonMachine learning researcher.Open the full entry dates back to the late 1970s and grew stronger as both collaborated with Rumelhart.⁠[5]

In September 1981 he and Rumelhart published the interactive activation model in Psychological Review: detectors for features, letters and words interact through excitation and inhibition, and simulations reproduced the perceptual advantage for letters in words and pronounceable pseudowords, accounting for apparently rule-governed performance without any actual rules.⁠[6]

In 1984 he moved to Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry, where he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.⁠[7]

In 1986 MIT Press published the two-volume Parallel Distributed Processing by him, Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group; the second volume applies connectionist theory to perception, memory, language and thought.⁠[8]

Stanford noted that the book brought the concept of parallel computation to a wider audience in psychology, neuroscience and computer science.⁠[9]

In 1986 Rumelhart and McClelland described a neural network that learned to turn English verb stems into past-tense forms; in 1988 Steven PinkerSteven PinkerSteven Pinker is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist and popular-science author who studies language, cognition and social relations; after more than two decades at MIT he has been a professor of psychology at Harvard University since 2003, and his books include The Language Instinct, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.Open the full entry and Alan Prince criticized its empirical performance and raised theoretical objections, starting a long-running past-tense debate. Researchers argued in 2018 that modern recurrent networks invalidate many of those criticisms.⁠[10]

From 1994 to 2006 he was co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.⁠[3]

In 1995 he, Bruce McNaughton and Randall O’Reilly proposed in Psychological Review that memories are first stored through synaptic changes in the hippocampal system and gradually integrated into the neocortex through repeated reinstatement; the hippocampus supports rapid learning of new items while the neocortex learns slowly to discover the structure of experience.⁠[11]

In January 2002 Carnegie Mellon announced that he and Rumelhart had won the 2002 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, worth $200,000, for two decades of work on parallel distributed processing; he had also been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[2]

In 2004 MIT Press published Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach, written with Timothy T. Rogers, which proposes that semantic knowledge is acquired through gradual adjustment of the connection strengths among interconnected processing units.⁠[12]

In 2006 he moved to Stanford University’s psychology department, founded the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation in 2007, and chaired the department from fall 2009 through summer 2012.⁠[7]

He was the tenth recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize and gave the keynote at the Cognitive Science Society’s conference in August 2010; the society said he and his collaborators established an alternative to the symbolic theory of mind by building brain-inspired computer models of learning and intelligence.⁠[13]

In May 2014 he and Elizabeth Spelke became the inaugural recipients of the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, a $200,000 award honoring his role in formulating computational models of the spread of activation through brain networks.⁠[14]

On October 2, 2014, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences presented him in Amsterdam with the $200,000 C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science in recognition of his neural-network modeling of cognitive processes.⁠[15]

In December 2019 he released a preprint with Felix Hill, Maja Rudolph, Jason Baldridge and Hinrich Schütze arguing that language is part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations, an ability that rests on domain-general principles of biological neural networks such as connection-based learning and distributed representation.⁠[16]

The paper appeared under the title “Placing language in an integrated understanding system” in issue 42 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.⁠[17]

On September 20, 2021, he appeared as the guest of episode 222 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing beauty in neural networks, back-propagation, Dave Rumelhart and cognitive modeling, connectionism, Geoffrey Hinton, and Noam Chomsky and linguistic cognition.⁠[18]

On September 24, 2024, he, Geoffrey Hinton and the late David Rumelhart received the Golden Goose Award at the Library of Congress, which honors federally funded work that may have seemed odd or obscure when first conducted.⁠[19]

The Cognitive Science Society said the three were honored for their pioneering work on the PDP framework from the late 1970s and early 1980s.⁠[20]

He said language models need roughly 100,000 times more data than a human to learn a language; backpropagation was never thought to capture how the brain works, and he is studying how the brain so efficiently adjusts the right connections.⁠[4]

On January 29, 2025, he and Hinton recorded a conversation for the Stanford Psychology Podcast, which said it appeared to be their first recorded conversation in decades of friendship.⁠[5]

He is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.⁠[21]

Personal website: Public link: https://stanford.edu/~jlmcc/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Carnegie Mellon University: Official website: https://www.cmu.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

UC San Diego: Official website: https://ucsd.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]