Erasing the Homunculus as an Ongoing Mission: A Reply to the Commentaries

James R Schmidt, Baptist Liefooghe, Jan De Houwer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

In our recent article (Schmidt, Liefooghe, & De Houwer, 2020, this volume), we presented an adaptation of the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model for simulating instruction following and task-switching behaviour. In this paper, we respond to five commentaries on our article: Monsell & McLaren (2020), Koch & Lavric (2020), Meiran (2020), Longman (2020), and Pfeuffer (2020). The commentaries discuss potential future modelling goals, deeper reflections on cognitive control, and some potential challenges for our theoretical perspective and associated model. We focus primarily on the latter. In particular, we clarify that we (a) acknowledge the role of cognitive control in task switching, and (b) are arguing that certain task-switching effects do not serve as a good measure of said cognitive control. We also discuss some ambiguities in terminological uses (e.g., the meaning of "task-set reconfiguration"), along with some future experimental and modelling research directions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number28
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Cognition
Volume3
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Sept 2020

Keywords

  • computational modelling
  • neural networks
  • episodic memory
  • binding
  • switch costs
  • feature integration
  • task-rule congruency
  • instruction implementation
  • goals

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