ABSTRACT
The idea that the human cognitive system might consist of a collection of reflexive, autonomous, encapsulated modules serving a general-purpose, open-ended 'central module' was made popular by Fodor in his book, 'The modularity of mind'. The evidence for this view consisted of putative cases of so-called autonomous processing, particularly in lexical access and syntactic parsing. The evidence for this autonomy has not held up, and there is now a wide range of theory and data exploring the ways in which multiple sources of information can be simultaneously exploited for such purposes as segmentation of visual scenes into objects, recognition of phonemes, letters, and words, and assignment of structural relations among constituents of sentences.
