This continuation project is based on the hypothesis that it is useful to view human cognitive processes as arising from the interactions of large numbers of simple, interconnected processing units, operating in accordance with a general set of principles. According to these principles, representations are graded and distributed; processing is gradual (cascaded), competitive, interactive, and stochastic; and learning occurs through adaptive changes in the strengths of the connections among the units. In the previous funding period, these principles were used to construct models of interactive activation processing in perception, the dynamics of information processing, word and nonword reading, control of processing in schizophrenia, and complementary learning systems in hippocampus and neocortex. The continuation would asses the adequacy of the framework as a general model by applying it to four domains: 0003 examines processing of phonologically and morphologically complex words and sentences; 0004 investigates adaptive interactive processes in perception and attention: 0005 considers the structure and deterioration of declarative knowledge; and 0002 explores the control of information processing. Several of these investigations represent major extensions of the framework into domains long thought to be the province of traditional theories, where the adequacy of the principles will undergo severe tests. 0003 and 0005 explore learning, representation and processing in quasi-regular domains, in which items exhibit both partial consistency with other items together with idiosyncratic aspects. In each case, aspects of both normal and disordered cognitive function will be considered. Several of the projects build in detail on what is known about the physiology of the relevant systems. Each part of the project juxtaposes the results of experimental investigations with simulations of experimental data, so as to provide a detailed assessment of the adequacy of the models to account for the data in their domains of application. The Core component of the project will foster the further development of the theoretical framework through the examination of the representations that arise in the models and their modular organization. We expect all the parts of the current proposal to contribute to the evolution of our common theoretical framework as we continue our explorations of normal and disordered cognition.
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