Bowers challenged the common view in favor of distributed representations in psychological modeling and the main arguments given against localist and grandmother cell coding schemes. He revisited the results of several single-cell studies, arguing that they do not support distributed representations. We praise the contribution of Bowers (2009) for…

A central claim shared by most recent models of short-term memory (STM) is that item knowledge is coded independently from order in long-term memory (LTM; e.g., the letter A is coded by the same representational unit whether it occurs at the start or end of a sequence). Serial order is computed by dynamically binding these item codes to a separate…

A fundamental claim associated with parallel distributed processing (PDP) theories of cognition is that knowledge is coded in a distributed manner in mind and brain. This approach rejects the claim that knowledge is coded in a localist fashion, with words, objects, and simple concepts (e.g. "dog"), that is, coded with their own dedicated…

Visual word identification requires readers to code the identity and order of the letters in a word and match this code against previously learned codes. Current models of this lexical matching process posit context-specific letter codes in which letter representations are tied to either specific serial positions or specific local contexts (e.g.,…

It is argued that dual-process theory has misconstrued the correspondence between words' spelling and their phonology. A subsymbolic alternative to dual-processing theory is presented that includes a clear role for the process of phonologic coding. The subsymbolic approach is developed around a covariant learning hypothesis. (SLD)

This article presents a new model of transcoding numbers from verbal to arabic form. This model, called ADAPT, is developmental, asemantic, and procedural. The authors' main proposal is that the transcoding process shifts from an algorithmic strategy to the direct retrieval from memory of digital forms. Thus, the model is evolutive, adaptive, and…

Results of three studies, involving 606 high school and college students, show that the perceived randomness of a sequence is better predicted by its encoding difficulty than its objective randomness. Results imply that judging the extent of randomness of a sequence is based on the attempt to encode it. (SLD)

An associative model of serial learning is described based on the assumption that the effective stimulus for a serial-list item is generated by adaptation-level coding of the item's ordinal position. How the model can generate predictions of aspects of serial-learning data is illustrated. (SLD)