Such Stuff as Habits Are Made On

A Reply to

  • Botvinick, Matthew M.
  • Plaut, David C.

  • 1Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania

    2Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University.

3Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew M. Botvinick, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 10104-6241. E-mail:[email protected].

The present study was supported by National Institute of Health Awards MH16804 to Matthew M. Botvinick and MH64445 to J. McClelland and David C. Plaut. Code for the simulation presented in the Appendix is available for download at http://www.ccn.upenn.edu/∼mmb

Received February 3, 2006; Revision received April 20, 2006; Accepted April 24, 2006

Psychological Review 113(4):p 917-927, October 2006.

The representations and mechanisms guiding everyday routine sequential action remain incompletely understood. In recent work, the authors proposed a computational model of routine sequential behavior that took the form of a recurrent neural network (). Subsequently, put forth a detailed critique of that work, contrasting it with their own account, which assumes a strict hierarchical processing system (). The authors respond here to the main points of R. P. Cooper and T. Shallice's (2006) critique. Although careful and constructive, the arguments offered by mistook several superficial implementational issues for fundamental theoretical ones, underestimated the computational power of recurrent networks as a class, and in some ways mischaracterized the relationship between the accounts they compare. In responding to these points, the authors articulate several key theoretical choices facing models of routine sequential behavior.

Copyright © 2006 by the American Psychological Association