This review describes and motivates six principles for computational cognitive neuroscience models: biological realism, distributed representations, inhibitory competition. bidirectional activation propagation, error-driven task learning, and Hebbian model learning. Although these principles are supported by a number of hive, computational and biological motivations, the prototypical neural-network I (a feedforward back-propagation network) incorporates only two of them, and widely used model incorporates all of them. It is argued here that these principles should be integrated into a coherent overall framework, and some potential synergies and conflicts in doing so are discussed.