connectionism

n. 1. A theory of learning in which neural connections between stimuli and responses are the basis of learning. 2. In cognitive psychology, an approach to learning and memory in which knowledge is encoded as connections between multiple nodes rather than in a single location or memory entity. This suggests that knowledge is distributed rather than local and is defined by a net of activation that has a particular spread. It includes artificial intelligence programs that use spreading nets of activation to model neural networks.