Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Dr. Risto Miikkulainen for his invaluable advice and guidance throughout this work. He contributed many valuable insights and criticisms and also greatly improved the quality of the writing. I would also like to thank Dr. Wilson S. Geisler for providing background information, and for reading the final draft and related papers. I am grateful to Joseph Sirosh for his assistance on the RF-LISSOM code.

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant #IRI-9309273. Computer time for the simulations was provided by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center under grant IRI940004P.