The papers appearing in this proceedings volume cover a broad range of subjects, owing to the highly cross-disciplinary character of the workshop, and include: experiments and models concerning the dynamics of the neural activity in the cortex (DMS experiments, attractor dynamics in the cortex, spontaneous activity…); hippocampus, space and memory; theoretical advances in neural network modeling; information processing in neural networks; applications of neural networks to experimental physics, particularly to high energy physics; digital and analog hardware implementations of neural networks; etc.

Neural network models, in addition to being of intrinsic theoretical interest, have also proved to be a useful framework in which issues in theoretical biology can be put into perspective. These issues include, amongst others, modelling the activity of the cortex and the study of protein folding. More recently, neural network models have been extensively investigated as tools for data analysis in high energy physics experiments. These workshop proceedings reflect the strongly interdisciplinary character of the field and provide an updated overview of recent developments.

This volume features the complete text of the material presented at the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Papers have been loosely grouped by topic and an author index is provided in the back. As in previous years, the symposium included an interesting mixture of papers on many topics from researchers with diverse backgrounds and different goals, presenting a multifaceted view of cognitive science. In hopes of facilitating searches of this work, an electronic index on the Internet's World Wide Web is provided. Titles, authors, and summaries of all the papers published here have been placed in an online database which may be freely searched by anyone. You can reach the web site at: www-csli.stanford.edu/cogsci97.