ABSTRACT
The general strategy in cognitive modeling is to open up the big "black box" representing the organism (or its brain) and to postulate a complex system of many smaller boxes in order to depict the causal relationships prevailing between distinct mental or information-processing functions. For example, models of human memory systems have been based on such functional distinctions: memory has been divided into procedural, semantic, episodic, and working memory. The last has been further subdivided into "the phonological loop," "the visuo-spatial sketchpad," and "the central executive" (Baddeley, 1986). Jerry Fodor's (1983) ideas on the modularity of mind encouraged functionalistic thinking also in neuropsychology, where theorizing was soon started to be made in terms of "modules." Indeed, the idea of human mind as a modular system is one of the central hypotheses of modem cognitive neuropsychology. Mind and brain are believed to be so organized that cognition is mediated by large numbers of relatively independent processing modules, each of which can be separately impaired (Ellis & Young, 1988).
