Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A hybrid architecture for working memory: Reply to MacDonald and Christiansen (2002).

2002; American Psychological Association; Volume: 109; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/0033-295x.109.1.55

1939-1471

Marcel Adam Just, Sashank Varma,

Cognitive Science and Mapping

This article responds to M. C. MacDonald and M. H. Christiansen’s 2002 commentary on the capacity theory of working memory (WM) and its computational implementation, the Capacity-Constrained Collaborative Activation– based Production System (3CAPS). The authors also point out several shortcomings in MacDonald and Christiansen’s proposal for the construal of WM, arguing that at some level of description, their model is a variant of a small subset of the 3CAPS theory. The authors go on to describe how the symbolic and connectionist mechanisms within the hybrid 3CAPS architecture combine to produce a processing style that provides a good match to human sentence comprehension and other types of high-level cognition. The properties of 3CAPS are related to the development of other connectionist, symbolic, and hybrid systems. This article has the goals of (a) refuting some of MacDonald and Christiansen’s (2002) incorrect descriptions of the capacity theory of sentence comprehension as described in Just and Carpenter (1992); (b) pointing out the theoretical and empirical difficulties with MacDonald and Christiansen’s alternative approach and with their simple recurrent network (SRN) model in particular; and (c) pointing out some commonalities between symbolic, connectionist, and hybrid approaches, describing some of their formal properties and their application to a number of cognitive phenomena.