Overview Of Mental Module:a New Paradigm Of Cognitive Psychology

The theoretical goal of this paper is to construct the "overview of mental module" as a new paradigm of cognitive psychology, which belongs to a typical research of theoretical psychology.Overview of mental module is a new paradigm or perspective to explain "how mind work". It advocates some kind of interdisciplinary study about mental module or modular psychology. This theory assumes that human mind (cognition) essentially consists of many functionally independent units (modules). The research goal is to explore the psychological mechanisms shared by all human beings. In other words, it tries to look for "universal human nature" that is the common psychological traits of all human species.The paper consists of seven chapters. The first chapter gives a detailed review on the evolution historical process of the modularity of mind. The main purpose is to find out contemporary significance of module theory (including faculty psychology) in history of psychology as far as possible, which shows that the module theory has long historical origins and profound academic background. The second chapter conducts a comprehensive study and review about the mental module. It focuses on refining the positive significance of related researches of mental module theory. The third chapter reflects the defect on the historical and recent mental module theory. All above, it lays the theoretical foundation for the construction of the new module theory.The core and the innovation of this study is the fourth chapter to the sixth chapter. Starting from the psychological research "paradigm", this part constructs the overview of mental module as a new paradigm of cognitive psychology from the following three aspects:the theoretical hypothesis, the conceptual framework, the research methods, and the perception module, the language module, the counting module, the reasoning module and the " theory of mind " module are discussed in detail. The fourth chapter, focuses on the theoretical hypothesis as the premise and the beginning point of mental module concept:the unity of body and mind is the basic presupposition of mental module theory; mental module is the evolved psychological mechanism embodied in human brain; human mind is a "decomposable system "; the mind is the product of interaction of many functionally independent units. On this basis, it expounds the research hypothesis of five mental modules such as perception modules and so on.The fifth chapter discusses the concept framework of overview of mental module, including the definition, classification and standard of modules. Several typical module concepts are comparatively analyzed. This module is the concept of function, mechanism, and computing. From the point of view of Fodor’s multimodal module standard, the chapter originally proposes the standard of module which includes domain specificity, relative encapsulation and separability. Besides, this chapter classifies all kinds of mental modules from the different dimensions including "synchronic-diachronic " and psychological explanation levels, and analyzes the conceptual framework of five mental modules.The sixth chapter discusses the research methods on mental module theory. First, it provides the general methodology of philosophy, and then describes the research approach of five specific mental modules such as perception module. Its general methodology includes "function decomposition method","organization hierarchy method", combination of analysis and unitary method, interdisciplinary research methods.Based on the seven chapters of the above, overview of mental module has been established. The seventh chapter sums up the revolutionary significance of mental module theory for the general psychology, especially the traditional cognitive psychology in the mainstream. Overview of mental module revolts to traditional cognitive psychology, which mainly reflects in three aspects:surpassing the "psychological homogeneity "and the "psychological cultural view"; inspiring the research on embodied cognition.The last chapter summarizes the innovations of the study, and put forward the prospects for future research based on the shortages of the study.