Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Flexible information routing in the brain is crucial to perform sequential tasks in which an operation takes as input theresult of the preceding operation (e.g. add 2 to a given digit, then compare the result to 5). Experiments suggest thatindividual operations such as addition and comparison can proceed subliminally, while their chaining requires consciousperception. Here we use the semantic pointer architecture to model a global workspace and specialist processors withspiking neurons. Non-conscious information has limited spatio-temporal influence in our model, while information that isselected to enter the global workspace can be maintained over time and selectively routed to the processors whose role isto execute the operations. The model can perform three tasks that consist of different operation chains. Response timesand accuracy are compared to human performance data.