Behavioral and Brain Sciences



Open Peer Commentary
Halford et al.: Relational complexity

On the psychological reality of parallel relational architectures: Whose knowledge system is it anyway?


Margaret Chalmers a1 and Brendan McGonigle a1
a1 Department of Psychology, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh EH8 9QT, Scotland, U.K. m.mcgonigle@ed.ac.uk or ejua48@ed.ac.uk www.psy.ed.ac.uk/nis

Abstract

We argue that Halford et al.'s characterisation of relational complexity offers an unadaptive principle in terms of cognitive economy, that its relation with the empirical evidence is highly selective, and that the task behaviours used in support of a multivector processing space are better described by linear serial processes which do not require n-dimensional mappings for their emergence.