Introduction to Neural and Cognitive Modeling

Daniel Levine's "Introduction to Neural and Cognitive Modeling" offers a unique psychological perspective on neural networks, cognitive science, and machine intelligence from one of the foremost experts in the field. This textbook, for those who take the time to read it, offers a comprehensive overview of the history of the discipline, neurophysiology, memory models, learning and conditioning, machine categorization, knowledge representation, and recent advances in the science. For those without a background in neurobiology or differential equations, he includes primers as well to get you up to speed. The flow of the textbook is laid out such that those courses focusing on only one or two topics can cover them without needing to review too much background. Levine also presents a variety of models useful for speech recognition, motor control, spatiotemporal pattern recognition, supervised and unsupervised machine learning and classification models, long and short-term memory models, attention, inhibition, computer vision, error correction, and back propagation. This text is one of the most bookmarked and referenced in my collection, and the one I most frequently recommend and lend to my colleagues. It operates as a textbook as well as a reference, with coverage as deep as it is broad. I highly recommend this text to novice and expert alike, or to anyone interested in the art and science of neural network-based cognitive modeling with a distinct psychological flavor. This one's a gem I'm glad to keep close at hand.