Connectionist models are not like this. First of all, it is arguable that their behavior is not empirical at all. Even if one does not buy this, however, there is little to warrant regarding connectionist nets as being homologous to animal models because we simply do not yet have any strong reason to believe that connectionist networks have anything like the relevant similarities to in vivo human cognition that animal physiology have to human physiology. One project is simply to investigate what connectionist networks are capable of doing, and then to study how they are able to do these things, using cluster analysis, factor analysis, or whatever other analytic technique one favors. This is NOT cognitive science, however.
Cognitive science is the investigation of how cognition works.
One of the hypotheses currently taking its turn to prove itself is that cognition is produced by the activity of connectionist networks. Note that this is not very strong evidence in and of itself. One way to go is to say that each node represents a concept or proposition. This is, effectively, the claim of localist connectionists. One way is to claim that nodes and connections correspond to neurons in the brain, or to related bits of neural anatomy.