Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

PDP networks that use nonmonotonic activation functions often produce hidden unit regularities that permit the internal structure of these networks to be interpreted (Berkeley et al, 1995; Dawson, 1998; McCaughan, 1997). In some cases, these regularities are associated with local interpretations (Dawson, Medler & Berkeley, 1997). Berkeley has used this observation to suggest that there are fewer differences between symbols and subsymbols than one might expect (Berkeley, 1997). We suggest below that this kind of conclusion is premature, because it ignores the fact that regardless of their content, the local features of these networks are not combined symbolically. W e illustrate this point with the interpretation of a network trained on a variant of Hinton's (1986) kinship problem, and show how the network's behavior depends on the coarse coding of information represented by hidden unit bands, even when these bands have local interpretations. We conclude that nonmonotonic PDP networks actually provide an excellent example of the differences between symbolic and subsymbolic processing.