Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionModularity and cognition
Section snippets
Necessary conditions for modularity?
It is clear that many authors have understood Fodor to be proposing that the features of modularity listed in Box 1 are necessary conditions for the applicability of the term – that is, a cognitive system is not a module unless it possesses all of these features.
For example, Wojciulik, Kanwisher and Driver3 found in an fMRI study that neural activity in the fusiform gyrus in response to faces was modulated by attention, and took this result to be surprising because that region is supposed to be
What is information encapsulation?
Bishop5 and Hulme and Snowling6 both argue that Fodorian modularity is inconsistent with top-down processing, because such processing constitutes a violation of information encapsulation. They then go on to argue that, because top-down processing is characteristic in children when they are dealing with language, the concept of modularity is inappropriate in a developmental context. Both concede, however, that this is not a problem as far as the skilled language user is concerned because skilled
Could modules be ‘assembled’?
In the preliminary discussion in his book, Fodor poses the following question. If a computational system is a module, could it be
‘…“assembled” (in the sense of having been put together from some stock of more elementary subprocesses) or does its virtual architecture map relatively directly onto its neural implementation?’ (Fodor, p. 37.)
His answer was that modules are not assembled. It is interesting to note here not only that he gives no reason for making this choice, but also that, when he
A neo-Fodorian account of modularity
First, it is helpful here to distinguish between ‘knowledge module’ and ‘processing module’. A knowledge module is a body of knowledge that is autonomous: independent of other bodies of knowledge; for example, a linguist might say ‘syntax is a module’. A processing module is a mental information-processing system; for example, a psycholinguist might say ‘during language comprehension, sentences are parsed by a syntactic processing module’. I am concerned here with processing modules, not
Acknowledgements
I thank Robyn Langdon, Anna Woollams, Greg Currie and Hugh Clapin for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and participants at the ARC Workshop on Cognitive Simulation, Theory of Mind and Modularity, particularly Martin Davies, Jay Garfield, Philip Gerrans, Philip Pettit, Kim Sterelny and Daniel Stoljar, for valuable discussion and criticism.
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Effective connectivity analysis reveals the time course of the Stroop effect in manual responding
2023, Biological PsychologyResting state EEG network modularity predicts literacy skills in L1 Chinese but not in L2 English
2021, Brain and LanguageCitation Excerpt :Although the EEG data were collected at the scalp level, the phase coherence estimates of phase relationships should be partially invariant to volume conduction (Chennu et al., 2017; Fraga González et al., 2018); hence, the modularity index computed based on the phase coherence matrix should be a valid indicator for brain network modularity. A neural network with high modularity has many connections within modules which allow for faster processing (Coltheart, 1999) and reduce network wiring costs (Clune, Mouret, & Lipson, 2013). Meanwhile, a high modularity neural network also has few connections between modules which results in a neural network with relatively independent modules and so increases the flexibility in learning (Ellefsen, Mouret, & Clune, 2015).
Delusions and theories of belief
2020, Consciousness and Cognition3 x Phonology
2022, Canadian Journal of Linguistics