Interactive Effects of Explicit Emergent Structure: A Major Challenge for Cognitive Computational Modeling

David Marr's (1982) three-level analysis of computational cognition argues for three distinct levels of cognitive information processingnamely, the computational, representational, and implementational levels. But Marr's levels areand were meant to bedescriptive, rather than interactive and dynamic. For this reason, we suggest that, had Marr been writing today, he might well have gone even farther in his analysis, including the emergence of structurein particular, explicit structure at the conceptual levelfrom lower levels, and the effect of explicit emergent structures on the level (or levels) that gave rise to them. The message is that today's cognitive scientists need not only to understand how emergent structuresin particular, explicit emergent structures at the cognitive leveldevelop but also to understand how they feed back on the sub-structures from which they emerged.