ABSTRACT
This symposium focused on the role to be played by notions of modularity in the field of cognitive science. Modularity has exhibited several different construals in various areas within the cognitive and neural sciences. It has been applied in language research as a strict encapsulation of information (Forster, 1979). It has been employed in defining the initial stages of a fuzzy logical model of information integration (Massaro, 1989). It has been split into notions of representational versus processing modularity (Tanenhaus, Dell & Carlson, 1987). It has been used to partially constrain interactive connectionist networks (Jacobs, Jordan & Barto, 1991). It has been loosely accepted in visual neuroscience as a catch-phrase for brain structures that are mostly specialized for certain subdomains of information (Lennie, 1996). And, finally, it has been criticized entirely as encouraging oversimplified, and sometimes misleading, "descriptive conveniences" (McClelland, in press).
