I consider the role of cognitive modeling in cognitive science. Modeling, and the computers that enable it, are central to the field, but the role of modeling is often misunderstood. Models are not intended to capture fully the processes they attempt to elucidate. Rather, they are explorations of ideas about the nature of cognitive processes. In these explorations, simplification is essential—through simplification, the implications of the central ideas become more transparent. This is not to say that simplification has no downsides; (...) it does, and these are discussed. I then consider several contemporary frameworks for cognitive modeling, stressing the idea that each framework is useful in its own particular ways. Increases in computer power (by a factor of about 4 million) since 1958 have enabled new modeling paradigms to emerge, but these also depend on new ways of thinking. Will new paradigms emerge again with the next 1,000‐fold increase? (shrink)

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic (...) encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER++. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging. (shrink)

By hypothesis, awareness is involved in the modulation of feedback from semantics to the lexical level in the visual word recognition system. When subjects are aware of the fact that there are many related prime–target pairs in a semantic priming experiment, this knowledge is used to configure the system to feed activation back from semantics to the lexical level so as to facilitate processing. When subjects are unaware of this fact, the default set is maintained in which activation is not (...) fed back from semantics to the lexical level so as to conserve limited resources. Qualitative differences in the pattern of data from two lexical decision experiments that employ masked priming are consistent with this hypothesis. Semantic context and stimulus quality interact when the prime is processed with awareness whereas these same two factors produce additive effects on RT when the prime is unlikely to have been processed with awareness. These experiments thus illustrate one way in which awareness affects the dynamics of visual word recognition. (shrink)