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. 2020 Sep 10;3(1):28.
doi: 10.5334/joc.117.

Erasing the Homunculus as an Ongoing Mission: A Reply to the Commentaries

James R Schmidt  1 , Baptist Liefooghe  2 , Jan De Houwer  3
Affiliations

Erasing the Homunculus as an Ongoing Mission: A Reply to the Commentaries

James R Schmidt et al. J Cogn. .

Abstract

In our recent article (Schmidt, Liefooghe, & De Houwer, 2020, this volume), we presented an adaptation of the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model for simulating instruction following and task-switching behaviour. In this paper, we respond to five commentaries on our article: Monsell & McLaren (2020), Koch & Lavric (2020), Meiran (2020), Longman (2020), and Pfeuffer (2020). The commentaries discuss potential future modelling goals, deeper reflections on cognitive control, and some potential challenges for our theoretical perspective and associated model. We focus primarily on the latter. In particular, we clarify that we (a) acknowledge the role of cognitive control in task switching, and (b) are arguing that certain task-switching effects do not serve as a good measure of said cognitive control. We also discuss some ambiguities in terminological uses (e.g., the meaning of "task-set reconfiguration"), along with some future experimental and modelling research directions.

Keywords: binding; computational modelling; episodic memory; feature integration; goals; instruction implementation; neural networks; switch costs; task-rule congruency.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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