Integrating "different" models in cognitive psychology

Abstract

In seeking to integrate different models, one may encounter two main obstacles, i.e. the models might not share the same sense of 'model' and they might not have the same object. In this article it is argued that the first hindrance can be overcome whilst the second cannot. In cognitive psychology, the concept of model oscillates between a psychological sense (a knowledge-representation system) and an epistemological sense (a set of hypotheses, often limited in some aspect). However, these senses can be intermixed, since hypotheses may turn out to be a particular kind of representation or may, themselves, use some kind of representation. Models which are 'different' only in kind may be compared and possibly integrated, but the critical aspect is that they should concern the same psychological function (or functions), either as tools to represent it or as hypotheses on it, independent of implementation. The relevant questions are, then, how to identify which model function is concerned, how psychological variables inside models are defined and in particular what the relationship is between functional variables and their 'labels'. Examples of these topics in both symbolic and connectionist models are given.