Jay McClelland

Timeline

1. 1975–1984

   A path into cognitive psychology

   After earning his 1975 PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the University of California, San Diego faculty and moved to Carnegie Mellon in 1984.

2. 1982

   Letters in context

   With David Rumelhart, he published Part 2 of the interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception.

3. 1984–2006

   A framework for cognition

   At Carnegie Mellon, he became a University Professor and held the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Chair. He co-founded the Parallel Distributed Processing Research Group with David Rumelhart; the group published the two-volume Parallel Distributed Processing in 1986.

4. 2006–2012

   A Stanford center

   In 2006, he moved to Stanford, founded the Center for Mind, Brain, and Computation in 2007, and chaired the Psychology Department from fall 2009 through summer 2012.

5. 2010

   The Rumelhart Prize

   At the Cognitive Science Society's 32nd annual meeting in August 2010, he received the Rumelhart Prize and delivered its lecture.

6. 2014

   A Heineken Prize

   In 2014, he received the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science.

7. 2025

   Writing about minds and machines

   With computational neuroscientist Gaurav Suri, he co-authored The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines, a book about the relationship between neural networks in brains and AI systems.

8. As of October 2026

   Researching cognition and AI

   As of October 2026, he is Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Stanford, and director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology. His lab studies mathematical cognition and reasoning in humans and contemporary AI systems based on neural networks.