Dominance and Modularity

In this paper we argue that all modes of perception are organized into salient and background constituents. We show that this organization is parallel to that of sentences which are divided into a focus constituent and background. We then argue that the process of recognizing these foregrounded constituents is nonmodular (in Fodor's sense) since it is conditioned by features external to each module. We suggest that a single task-specific mechanism is involved in identifying the highlighted constituent in representations of all modular systems. This mechanism belongs to the central system of cognitive functions but applies prior to other central processes which presuppose the foreground-background organization.