James McClelland (born December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department.He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models (or neural networks) to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the "connectionist revolution" of the 1980s, which saw a large increase in scientific interest for connectionism.He received Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History in 2014 for his important and funda­mental contributions to the use of neural networks to model cognitive processes of the brain.