Interactions Between Knowledge Representations: Theoretical and Experimental Aspects

At the heart of current psychological and neuroscientific research are questions about the nature of mental representations underlying cognition and communication. Existing approaches to studying what cognition is “made of” vary from strictly modular to vastly interactive approaches. Regardless, most theories focus on individual knowledge representations and brain structures supporting them. However, resource-efficient and successful cognitive processing requires integration of information across multiple sources, modules, or even cognitive domains. This integration, at least in part, may involve interplay between accessed knowledge representations, on the one hand, and general cognitive systems of attention, memory, affect, etc., on the other.

To address this issue, quickly emerging literature on cross-representational priming provides initial evidence about the capacity of mental representations to interact with each other in contexts where two or more representations are co-activated or activated in close sequence. The studies included in this Research Topic will address two general questions. Firstly, can co-activated or subsequently activated representations share properties allowing priming between them? Secondly, how are domain-general processes (e.g., attention, working memory, executive control) involved in this integrative process? Do they potentially provide an interface in which interactions between different cognitive representations and domains are supported, and if so, in what way?

This Research Topic will feature original research, commentaries, opinions, and reviews discussing the latest advances and challenges in the frontline research and provide a joint discussion forum for a wide range of researchers from the domains of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and psycholinguistics, among others.