Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper attempts to unify two problems in cognitive science: the relationship between "controlled" and "automatic"processing and the competing computational models of intelligence proposed by symbolic Artificial Intelligence and the connectionist school. An architecture is proposed in which symbolic and connectionist problem solving systems interact and take advantage of their different strengths. It is argued that the resulting system can account for much of the problem solving behavior associated with automatic and controlled processing as wellas their complex interplay. Thus, the architecture can account for how expertise can be transformed from "explicit" to "compiled"forms via automatization, and how the opacity of the resulting automatic behavior can be counterbalanced in a cognitively plausible manner by explanations generated ei post facto.