Enzymatic modularity and semantic effects in cognition

Some have argued that central processes such as reasoning or decision-making cannot be “modular” or “specialized” because of the flexible nature of human cognition. Others argue that all psychological processes must be specialized because no process could operate on all information under all circumstances and still generate systematically useful outputs. In this talk I show how these views can be reconciled by considering what design features central processes would have to possess in order to be both specialized and to have unrestricted access to a central database.