Commentary: new kids on the connectionist modeling block.

Yes, Herb Simon even had something to say about cognitive development. His suggestions, published over 40 years ago in an SRCD monograph, contained two ideas that departed radically from the then-prevailing views in developmental psychology. The first idea was that a cognitive theory could be stated as a computer program from which the complex implications of the theory could be unambiguously derived. The second idea was that, if different states of cognitive development could be described as programs, then the developmental process itself could also be described as a program that transformed the earlier program into the later one. Such a program would be a computational model possessing some of the same self-modification capacities as the child’s developing mind.