Jay McClelland is a Professor in the Psychology Department and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford. His research addresses a broad range of topics in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, including Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). Jay's PhD thesis is titled "Preliminary Letter Identification in the Perception of Words and Nonwords", which he completed in 1975 at University of Pennsylvania. We discuss his work in the thesis on the word superiority effect, how it led to the Integrated Activation model, the path to Parallel Distributed Processing and the connectionist revolution, and distributed vs rule-based and symbolic approaches to modeling human cognition and artificial intelligence. - Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode31.html - Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter - Find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html - Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview