This perspective generates an assumption that the processes supporting personal-level thinking are linear — i.e., that earlier representations are directly available to later personal-level cognition.

A reason why assumptions about linearity may have been problematic is that when, following Broadbent, we think about hierarchical perceptual processing while bearing in mind the communications engineer’s concerns about capacity limitations, it then becomes natural to make some additional assumptions about the way in which this hierarchically organized architecture supports personal-level cognition. The early/late debate’s problems are more plausibly blamed on these additional assumptions, rather