A hybrid architecture for working memory: Reply to MacDonald and Christiansen (2002)

This article responds to M. C. MacDonald and M. H. Christiansen's 2002 commentary on the capacity theory of working memory (WM) and its computational implementation, the Capacity-Constrained Collaborative Activation-based Production System (3CAPS). The authors also point out several shortcomings in MacDonald and Christiansen's proposal for the construal of WM, arguing that at some level of description, their model is a variant of a small subset of the 3CAPS theory. The authors go on to describe how the symbolic and connectionist mechanisms within the hybrid 3CAPS architecture combine to produce a processing style that provides a good match to human sentence comprehension and other types of high-level cognition. The properties of 3CAPS are related to the development of other connectionist, symbolic, and hybrid systems.