Erasing the homunculus as an ongoing mission: A reply to the commentaries
Category
Journal Article
Authors
Schmidt, J. R., Liefooghe, B., De Houwer, J.
Year
2020
Title
Erasing the homunculus as an ongoing mission: A reply to the commentaries
Journal / book / conference
Journal of Cognition
Abstract
In our recent article (Schmidt, Liefooghe, & De Houwer, in press), 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 (in press), Koch & Lavric (in press), Meiran (in press), Longman (in press), and Pfeuffer (in press). 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.
Issue
3
Pages
Article 28
Keywords
computational modelling, neural networks, episodic memory, binding, switch costs, feature integration, task-rule congruency, instruction implementation, goals