Integration of information: Reflections on the theme of attention and performance XVI

In the early 1980s the idea that key aspects of cognition arise from the independent activity of autonomous modules was popular in several areas of the cognitive and neural sciences. This divide-and-conquer approach was represented by Chomsky's (1980) position on the autonomy of language in general and syntax in particular, by Marr s (1982) emphasis on independent computation of surface properties from each of several distinct visual cues, and by Fodor s (1983) advocacy of modularity as a general principle of brain organization. These ideas were advances over earlier approaches that attempted to encompass all of cognition or behavior in terms of a few very general principles. Paradigms like Gestalt psychology, geneHc epistemology, and behaviorism were all radically different, but they each offered a broad framework intended to encompass a wide range of diverse phenomena. All of these approaches ultimately proved unsatisfying, and more modular approaches may have arisen in part because of the perception that one of the problems with these approaches lay in the very attempt to generalize so broadly. Chomsky certainly taught us a great deal more about language than Skinner, and Marr certainly took us beyond the vague holism of the Gestaltists toward a much more explicit computational understanding of the extraction of shape from visual cues. Focus on a specific domain and attention to its details, as if it were autonomous, has led to insights that have sharpened our understanding of language and perception. But now that these advances have been achieved, it may be Hme to go beyond modularity and consider integration again. The sciences of mind and brain have seen an alternaHonbetween global approaches and more modular approaches before. In the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, ideas about the organizaHon of function in the brain alternated between varieties of equipotentialism and much more localist treatments. In my own scienHfic education, the history of this alternation was used to make two distinct and equally important points. Teitelbaum (1967), an

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