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Relationship between working memory and the access/use of semantic information
Semester II 2003
(Room 137 Education, 3 November 2003, 12.00 noon)
Abstract
Do we describe a painting as a picture, or as a series of brush-strokes?
When it comes to mental activity, if we describe mental states in a
declarative form (picture) then are we overlooking how these mental
states perform their critical causal roles? Are we simply passing the
onus of explanation onto an homunculus? Results from semantic
priming, working memory and learning experiments are used to argue
that an adequate account of mental activity may require reference to
different types of formally specified procedural information that operates
in real-time, rather than information in a declarative form.
