Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Given the massively parallel nature of the brain an obvious question is why are so many information proccssing functions serial? In particular, this ftapter addresses the issue of the comparison process. Behavioral data show that in perceptual matching tasks (such as menwry scanning and visual search) performance is systematically affected by stimulus load, in that required processing time increases with each additional comparison item It is arguable whether this indicates a processing system that performs serial comparisons, or a system for which comparisons are done in parallel but reaction time is affected by load because of other system limitations. In this simulation we show that in a modular connectionist system vector transmission is possible in parallel, but the comparison process within a module must be done serially unless accuracy is sacrificed.