About the MCF – THE MODULAR COGNITION FRAMEWORK

The MCF stands for the MODULAR COGNITION FRAMEWORK.

The MCF provides researchers with a relatively open-ended psychological model of how the mind works as a ‘networks of systems.‘ It draws together many different strands of contemporary research and integrates them into a broad-based theoretical template allowing it to function as a basic frame of reference for theoretical and experimental work within any area of cognitive science. and away of showing how investigations within one specialist domain may or indeed may not reflect fundamental principles about the way human minds operate.

In this way, although there is an important distinction to be made between full-bodied ‘theories’ and ‘theoretical frameworks’, it may nevertheless still be seen as responding to the need for ‘unified theories of cognition as expressed by Alan Newell in his 1990 book: Unified theories of cognition published by Harvard University Press.

A short introductory tour is available in the Open Lecture series on topics in general as well as language cognition (see the Multimedia page). There is also a Facebook page.

Below you can find short answers to the following questions about the MCF:

Who is it for?

‘Modular?’ but in what sense?

About the Mind or about the Brain?

What ‘networks‘?

How is the framework ‘unifying‘?

How do you use the framework?

How can you ‘test’ the framework?

Who is it for?

The MCF provides researchers interested in the mind, how it works for their particular area of interest and who come from a variety of backgrounds with a common set of interconnected notions and terms.
The MCF is designed to assist in the development of explanations that are consistent with up-to-date findings in all relevant research fields and are expressed in terms that can be readily understood by people working in different disciplines.

‘Modular’ but in what sense?

‘Modularity’ is a term used by different approaches to explaining how both the mind and brain work. It is therefore important to define exactly what the term means in the MCF and particularly how it allows for for the dynamic, flexible nature of mental processing as well as the predominant feature associated with this term, namely functional specialisation,

Many otherwise differing approaches to the mind and brain assume the existence of functionally specialised systems. They may be separated out into ‘modules’ but these systems cannot stand in complete isolation from one another. Together, they form a collaborative network. The MCF has its own ways of explaining what they consist of and how they interact.

About the Mind or about the Brain?

The MCF is a framework for studying how the mind works and not the physical brain. The two levels of explanation need to respected. This means, for example, that a specific mental function may typically be carried out by more than one brain system and involve more than one brain location. A map of the mind will look radically different from a detailed map of the brain. The brain’s physical features may also change in many was while the mental function remains the same. That said, the framework is designed to facilitate associations between mind and brain so that advances in brain research need to be regularly scrutinised to check for any possible implications for accounts of mental functioning. The two levels of explanation should be kept sufficiently compatible to assist research on either side of the divide by facilitating meaningful and detailed associations between brain function and cognitive function.

What ‘networks’?

Brain operations involve myriads of neural networks. These are of course biological ones, not the ones used in artificial intelligence (AI). There are different types of neuron and different types of network involved.

Cognitive function in the mind is also described as involving networks. These are known as ‘schemas‘ and in the MCF this could mean two different but related things:

a) temporarily activated networks (schemas) of representations across different cognitive systems

b) The same underlying schemas formed by the specialised systems during online processing but in a currently inactive state. The representations involved in a schema are linked via interfaces between specialised system via system of indexation such that when one representation is activated any representation associated (‘coindexed’) with it will also be coactivated and activation will spread to all other representations in the schema (see the Architecture page for further details).

How is the framework ‘unifying’?

The MCF is an integration of various compatible theoretical perspectives drawn from various subdomains of cognitive science, notably theoretical linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. It provides a Big Picture of the mind, i.e. a basic view of the mechanism underlying memory, cognitive development and the role of consciousness.

The MCF is also an ‘open access’ framework in the sense that the initial architecture can be elaborated in various ways and according to the researchers’ special interests and experimental findings within their particular research field. The outcomes should represent a contribution both to the special field of interest and also to the developing picture of the mind as a whole (see also the short introductory YouTube presentations on Modelling the Mind).

MCF research has been especially concerned with the role language plays in the mind as a whole. As a result, what you get on this website is the framework expended and elaborated on the basis of selected, compatible theories and research findings across a range of subdomains within the scientific study of languages. In other words with regard to language cognition this represents not only an illustration but an application of MCF basic architecture.

How do you use the framework?

On the various pages that make up this website, you will find out how the framework has been developed so far together with many implementations. These pages will give an idea of how how the framework can be used in any research context having to do with the human mind. certainly including neuroscientific investigations. It can also be used (implemented) in more practical, applied domains which depend, explicitly or implicitly, on a sense of how the mind works. In such contexts, for example political or educational ones, it may provide useful insights by helping people to assess just how plausible and realistic a set of assumptions guiding an approach, method or technique designed to be useful in some aspects of human society will be when put intron practice to the extent the framework and its various implementations reflect what we currently understand about human behaviour and the way the mind works..

What are its basic assumptions?

The MCF takes as its premise that the mind is composed of a set of interacting expert cognitive systems. couple of these specialised systems are specifically linguistic in nature – they handle two types of linguistic structure and nothing else – and are unique to human beings. Human language processing as a whole is ‘mind-wide’, involving all the other cognitive systems as well.
MCF-based explanations are framed within a processing perspective. However, despite its processing perspective, the framework integrates issues surrounding real time mental activity with accounts of the representations that make up an individual’s current knowledge.

How do you ‘test’ the framework?

The short answer is you can’t test it as though it were a hypothesis specifically proposed to be put to the test; it’s a theoretical framework and as such it rests on work carried out within many different fields of research carried out by a great number of researchers. There are two ways in which you test it indirectly. Firstly, you can scrutinise the research on which its assumptions are based. For that you need to go to the literature where those claims and findings were presented and debated. Ultimately the best way of seeing if the framework does its job is see how successfully it explains human cognitive behaviour in the light of contemporary research findings compared with similar comprehensive theories and approaches. In the case of work carried out within the MOGUL project, this means explaining language cognition.

THE MODULAR COGNITION FRAMEWORK