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Modularity of mind is the notion that a
mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...
may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and
evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
arily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Jerry Fodor, the author of ''Modularity of Mind'', a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is ''binding''. When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that can operate in sync or independently that create a whole. Instead of just seeing ''red'', ''round'', ''plastic'', and ''moving'', the subject may experience a rolling red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple cognitive processes to perceive one thing.


Early investigations

Historically, questions regarding the ''functional architecture'' of the mind have been divided into two different theories of the nature of the faculties. The first can be characterized as a horizontal view because it refers to mental processes as if they are interactions between faculties such as memory, imagination, judgement, and perception, which are not domain specific (e.g., a judgement remains a judgement whether it refers to a perceptual experience or to the conceptualization/comprehension process). The second can be characterized as a vertical view because it claims that the mental faculties are differentiated on the basis of domain specificity, are genetically determined, are associated with distinct neurological structures, and are computationally autonomous. The vertical vision goes back to the 19th-century movement called
phrenology Phrenology () is a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.Wihe, J. V. (2002). "Science and Pseudoscience: A Primer in Critical Thinking." In ''Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience'', pp. 195–203. C ...
and its founder
Franz Joseph Gall Franz Josef Gall (; 9 March 175822 August 1828) was a German neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. Claimed as the founder of the pseudoscience of phrenology, Gall was an ...
. Gall claimed that the individual mental faculties could be associated precisely, in a one-to-one correspondence, with specific physical areas of the brain. For example, someone's level of intelligence could be literally "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. Phrenology's practice was debunked scientifically by Pierre Flourens in the 19th century. He destroyed parts of pigeons' and dogs' brains, called lesions, and studied the organisms' resulting dysfunction. He was able to conclude that while the brain localizes in some functions, it also works as a unit and is not as localized as earlier phrenologists thought. Before the early 20th century, Edward Bradford Titchener studied the modules of the mind through introspection. He tried to determine the original, raw perspective experiences of his subjects. For example, if he wanted his subjects to perceive an apple, they would need to talk about spatial characteristics of the apple and the different hues that they saw without mentioning the apple.


Fodor's ''Modularity of Mind''

In the 1980s, however, Jerry Fodor revived the idea of the modularity of mind, although without the notion of precise physical localizability. Drawing from
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
's idea of the
language acquisition device The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It i ...
and other work in
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
as well as from the
philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are add ...
and the implications of
optical illusion Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual perception, percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide v ...
s, he became a major proponent of the idea with the 1983 publication of ''Modularity of Mind''.Fodor, Jerry A. (1983). ''Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. According to Fodor, a module falls somewhere between the behaviorist and cognitivist views of lower-level processes.
Behaviorists Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual' ...
tried to replace the mind with reflexes, which are, according to Fodor, encapsulated (cognitively impenetrable or unaffected by other cognitive domains) and non-inferential (straight pathways with no information added). Low-level processes are unlike reflexes in that they can be inferential. This can be demonstrated by poverty of the stimulus argument, which posits that children do not only learn language from their environment, but are innately programmed with low-level processes that help them seek and learn language. The proximate stimulus, that which is initially received by the brain (such as the 2D image received by the retina), cannot account for the resulting output (for example, our 3D perception of the world), thus necessitating some form of computation. In contrast, cognitivists saw lower-level processes as continuous with higher-level processes, being inferential and cognitively penetrable (influenced by other cognitive domains, such as beliefs). The latter has been shown to be untrue in some cases, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion, which can persist despite a person's awareness of their existence. This is taken to indicate that other domains, including one's beliefs, cannot influence such processes. Fodor arrives at the conclusion that such processes are inferential like higher-order processes and encapsulated in the same sense as reflexes. Although he argued for the modularity of "lower level" cognitive processes in ''Modularity of Mind'' he also argued that higher-level cognitive processes are not modular since they have dissimilar properties. ''The Mind Doesn't Work That Way'', a reaction to Steven Pinker's ''
How the Mind Works ''How the Mind Works'' is a 1997 book by the Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in which the author attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms. Drawing heavily on th ...
'', is devoted to this subject. Fodor (1983) states that modular systems must—at least to "some interesting extent"—fulfill certain properties: # Domain specificity: modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs—they are specialised # Obligatory firing: modules process in a mandatory manner # Limited accessibility: what central processing can access from input system representations is limited # Fast speed: probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input) # Informational encapsulation: modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate # Shallow outputs: the output of modules is very simple # Specific breakdown patterns # Characteristic
ontogeny Ontogeny (also ontogenesis) is the origination and development of an organism (both physical and psychological, e.g., moral development), usually from the time of fertilization of the egg to adult. The term can also be used to refer to the s ...
: there is a regularity of development # Fixed neural architecture. Pylyshyn (1999) has argued that while these properties tend to occur with modules, one—information encapsulation—stands out as being the real signature of a module; that is the encapsulation of the processes inside the module from both cognitive influence and from cognitive access. One example is that conscious awareness that the Müller-Lyer illusion is an illusion does not correct visual processing.


Evolutionary psychology and massive modularity

The definition of ''module'' has caused confusion and dispute. In J.A. Fodor's views, modules can be found in peripheral and low-level visual processing, but not in central processing. Later, he narrowed the two essential features to ''domain-specificity'' and ''information encapsulation''. According to Frankenhuis and Ploeger, domain-specificity means that "a given cognitive mechanism accepts, or is specialized to operate on, only a specific class of information". Information encapsulation means that information processing in the module cannot be affected by information in the rest of the brain. One example is that the effects of an optical illusion, created by low-level processes, persist despite high-level processing caused by conscious awareness of the illusion itself. Other perspectives on modularity come from
evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evo ...
. Evolutionary psychologists propose that the mind is made up of genetically influenced and domain-specific mental algorithms or computational modules, designed to solve specific evolutionary problems of the past. Modules are also used for central processing. This theory is sometimes referred to as ''massive modularity.''
Leda Cosmides Leda Cosmides (born May 1957) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Cosmides originally studied biology at Radcliffe College/Harvard Univ ...
and
John Tooby John Tooby (born 1952) is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard Universit ...
claimed that modules are units of mental processing that evolved in response to selection pressures. To them, each module was a complex computer that innately processed distinct parts of the world, like facial recognition, recognizing human emotions, and problem-solving. On this view, much modern human psychological activity is rooted in adaptations that occurred earlier in
human evolution Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of '' Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual developmen ...
, when
natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...
was forming the modern human species. A 2010 review by evolutionary psychologists Confer et al. suggested that domain general theories, such as for "rationality," has several problems: 1. Evolutionary theories using the idea of numerous domain-specific adaptions have produced testable predictions that have been empirically confirmed; the theory of domain-general rational thought has produced no such predictions or confirmations. 2. The rapidity of responses such as jealousy due to infidelity indicates a domain-specific dedicated module rather than a general, deliberate, rational calculation of consequences. 3. Reactions may occur instinctively (consistent with innate knowledge) even if a person has not learned such knowledge. One example being that in the ancestral environment it is unlikely that males during development learn that infidelity (usually secret) may cause paternal uncertainty (from observing the phenotypes of children born many months later and making a statistical conclusion from the phenotype dissimilarity to the cuckolded fathers). With respect to general purpose problem solvers, Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby (1992) have suggested in ''The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture'' that a purely general problem solving mechanism is impossible to build due to the frame problem. Clune et al. (2013) have argued that computer simulations of the evolution of neural nets suggest that modularity evolves because, compared to non-modular networks, connection costs are lower. Several groups of critics, including psychologists working within evolutionary frameworks,Panksepp, J. & Panksepp, J. (2000)
The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology. Evolution and Cognition
6:2, 108-131.
argue that the massively modular theory of mind does little to explain adaptive psychological traits. Proponents of other models of the mind argue that the computational theory of mind is no better at explaining human behavior than a theory with mind entirely a product of the environment. Even within evolutionary psychology there is discussion about the degree of modularity, either as a few generalist modules or as many highly specific modules. Other critics suggest that there is little empirical support in favor of the domain-specific theory beyond performance on the
Wason selection task The Wason selection task (or ''four-card problem'') is a logic puzzle devised by Peter Cathcart Wason in 1966. It is one of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning. An example of the puzzle is: A response that identifies a car ...
, a task critics state is too limited in scope to test all relevant aspects of reasoning. Moreover, critics argue that Cosmides and Tooby's conclusions contain several inferential errors and that the authors use untested evolutionary assumptions to eliminate rival reasoning theories. Criticisms of the notion of modular minds from genetics include that it would take too much genetic information to form innate modularity of mind, the limits to the possible amount of functional genetic information being imposed by the number of mutations per generation that led to the prediction that only a small part of the human genome can be functional in an if an information-carrying way impossibly high rate of lethal mutations is to be avoided, and that selection against lethal mutations would have stopped and reversed any increase in the amount of functional DNA long before it reached the amount that would be required for modularity of mind. It is argued that proponents of the theory of mind conflate this with the straw man argument of assuming no function in any non-protein-coding DNA when pointing at discoveries of some parts of non-coding DNA having regulatory functions, while the actual argument of limited amount of functional DNA does acknowledge that some parts of non-coding DNA can have functions but putting bounds on the total amount of information-bearing genetic material regardless of whether or not it codes for proteins, in agreement with the discoveries of regulatory functions of non-coding DNA extending only to parts of it and not be generalized to all DNA that does not code for proteins. The maximum amount of information-carrying heredity is argued to be too small to form modular brains. Wallace (2010) observes that the evolutionary psychologists' definition of "mind" has been heavily influenced by cognitivism and/or
information processing Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process that ''describes'' everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock (a change in posi ...
definitions of the mind. Critics point out that these assumptions underlying evolutionary psychologists' hypotheses are controversial and have been contested by some psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists. For example, Jaak Panksepp, an affective neuroscientist, point to the "remarkable degree of neocortical plasticity within the human brain, especially during development" and states that "the developmental interactions among ancient special-purpose circuits and more recent general-purpose brain mechanisms can generate many of the "modularized" human abilities that evolutionary psychology has entertained." Philosopher David Buller agrees with the general argument that the human mind has evolved over time but disagrees with the specific claims evolutionary psychologists make. He has argued that the contention that the mind consists of thousands of modules, including sexually dimorphic jealousy and parental investment modules, are unsupported by the available
empirical evidence Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences ...
. He has suggested that the "modules" result from the brain's developmental plasticity and that they are adaptive responses to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments. However, Buller has also stated that even if massive modularity is false this does not necessarily have broad implications for evolutionary psychology. Evolution may create innate motives even without innate knowledge. In contrast to modular mental structure, some theories posit domain-general processing, in which mental activity is distributed across the brain and cannot be decomposed, even abstractly, into independent units. A staunch defender of this view is
William Uttal William Reichenstein Uttal (March 24, 1931 – February 5, 2017) was an American psychologist and engineer known for his criticism of cognitive neuroscience, and for his advocacy for distributed neural processing. In Uttal's obituary in the ''Am ...
, who argues in ''The New Phrenology'' (2003) that there are serious philosophical, theoretical, and methodological problems with the entire enterprise of trying to localise cognitive processes in the
brain A brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as Visual perception, vision. I ...
. Part of this argument is that a successful
taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...
of mental processes has yet to be developed. Merlin Donald argues that over evolutionary time the mind has gained adaptive advantage from being a general problem solver.Donald, ''A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness'

The mind, as described by Donald, includes module-like "central" mechanisms, in addition to more recently evolved "domain-general" mechanisms.


See also

* Automatic and Controlled Processes (ACP) * Faculty psychology * Jerry Fodor on mental architecture * Language module *
Modularity Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a sy ...
*
Neuroconstructivism Neuroconstructivism is a theory that states that phylogenetic developmental processes such as gene–gene interaction, gene–environment interaction and, crucially, ontogeny all play a vital role in how the brain progressively sculpts itself ...
* Neuroplasticity * Peter Carruthers (philosopher) * Society of Mind which proposes the mind is made up of
agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
s * Visual modularity


References


Further reading

* * Pylyshyn, Z.W. (1984). ''Computation and cognition: Toward a foundation for cognitive science''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (Also available through CogNet). * ''Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness'' Donald R. Griffin, University of Chicago Press, 2001 () * Shallice, Tim, & Cooper, Rick. (2011). ''The Organisation of Mind''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 3: Bridging the Theoretical Gap: from the Brain to Cognitive Theory (pp. 67–107).


Online videos


RSA talk
by evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban on modularity of mind, based on his book, ''Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite''
Stone Age Minds: A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Video
of a computer simulation of the evolution of modularity in neural nets. {{evolutionary psychology Behavioural sciences Cognition Cognitive science Evolutionary psychology Ethology Theory of mind Semantics Cognitive architecture