Knowledge Representation

Knowledge representation is fundamental to the study of mind. All theories of psychological processing are rooted in assumptions about how information is stored. These assumptions, in turn, influence the explanatory power of theories. This book fills a gap in the existing literature by providing an overview of types of knowledge representation techniques and their use in cognitive models.

Organized around types of representations, this book begins with a discussion of the foundations of knowledge representation, then presents discussions of different ways that knowledge representation has been used. Both symbolic and connectionist approaches to representation are discussed and a set of recommendations about the way representations should be used is presented. This work can be used as the basis for a course on knowledge representation or can be read independently. It will be useful to students of psychology as well as people in related disciplines--computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics--who want an introduction to techniques for knowledge representation.