ABSTRACT

The points of intersection between connectionism, Derrick, and Sigmund Freud offer a number of opportunities for an interrogation of cognition. This chapter focuses on only one particular issue that arises from this reorientation to cognition: the status of the psychical trace in cognitive theory. The central tenets of connectionist theory displace and defer the psychical trace through a system of differences, undermining the empirical drive toward a pure cognitive location. Frederic Bartlett's careful use of schemata as an argument against a theory of present, locatable traces, be they cognitive or perceptual, is thus disregarded, and the always already activated schemata are reduced to originary or constituent traces. Ulric Neisser ventures that acts of perception and previous acts of cognition generate traces of their activity. While Bartlett's notion of schema has become one of the key conceptual tools of contemporary cognitive psychology, such schemata now always function through the reconstruction of atomistic traces.