Botvinick Matthew, Plaut David C
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pensylvania School of Medicine and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Psychol Res. 2002 Nov;66(4):298-311. doi: 10.1007/s00426-002-0103-8. Epub 2002 Nov 7.
Representations of task context play a crucial role in shaping human behavior. While the nature of these representations remains poorly understood, existing theories share a number of basic assumptions. One of these is that task representations are discrete, independent, and non-overlapping. We present here an alternative view, according to which task representations are instead viewed as graded, distributed patterns occupying a shared, continuous representational space. In recent work, we have implemented this view in a computational model of routine sequential action. In the present article, we focus specifically on this model's implications for understanding task representation, considering the implications of the account for two influential concepts: (1) cognitive underspecification, the idea that task representations may be imprecise or vague, especially in contexts where errors occur, and (2) information-sharing, the idea that closely related operations rely on common sets of internal representations.
任务情境的表征在塑造人类行为方面起着至关重要的作用。虽然这些表征的本质仍知之甚少，但现有理论有一些共同的基本假设。其中之一是任务表征是离散的、独立的且不重叠的。我们在此提出一种不同的观点，据此任务表征反而被视为占据共享连续表征空间的分级分布式模式。在最近的工作中，我们已在常规序列动作的计算模型中实现了这一观点。在本文中，我们特别关注该模型对理解任务表征的影响，考虑该解释对两个有影响力的概念的影响：（1）认知欠规范，即任务表征可能不精确或模糊的观点，尤其是在出现错误的情境中；（2）信息共享，即密切相关的操作依赖于共同的内部表征集的观点。
