Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:29:59.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The limitations of the reverse-engineering approach to cognitive modeling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2012

Jay G. Rueckl
Jay G. Rueckl*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268; and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT 06511. [email protected]://web.uconn.edu/psychology/people/Faculty/Rueckl/Rueckl.html
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Frost's critique reveals the limitations of the reverse-engineering approach to cognitive modeling – the style of psychological explanation in which a stipulated internal organization (in the form of a computational mechanism) explains a relatively narrow set of phenomena. An alternative is to view organization as both the explanation for some phenomena and a phenomenon to be explained. This move poses new and interesting theoretical challenges for theories of word reading.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , October 2012 , pp. 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, S. & Hersch, J. (2010) Lexical precision in skilled readers: Individual differences in masked neighbor priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 139:299–318.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frost, R., Katz, L. & Bentin, S. (1987) Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13:104–15.Google ScholarPubMed
Perfetti, C. A. (2007) Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading 11:357–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plaut, D. C. & Gonnerman, L. M. (2000) Are non-semantic morphological effects incompatible with a distributed connectionist approach to lexical processing? Language and Cognitive Processes 15:445–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S. (2011) Reading in different writing systems: One architecture, multiple solutions. In: Dyslexia across languages: Orthography and the brain-gene-behavior link, ed. McCardle, P., Miller, B., Lee, J. R. & Tzeng, O. J. L., pp. 146–68. Paul H. Brookes.Google Scholar
Yap, M. J., Balota, D. A., Sibley, D. E. & Ratcliff, R. (2012) Individual differences in visual word recognition: Insights from the English Lexicon Project. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38:53–79.Google ScholarPubMed
Ziegler, J. C. & Goswami, U. (2005) Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin 131:3–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed