The MCF is open-ended in the sense that it has a set of basic principles (see below) describing the architecture of the human mind: these amounts to setting out a skeleton model of the mind and providing a template for cognitive scientists to use.
By the end of 2020 four books based specifically on the framework had been published along with over 35 articles and chapters; numerous publications and theses by researchers using the MCF for their own purposes had also appeared.
The predominant assumption of the MCF is that the mind is composed of a collaborative network of functionally specialized systems which have evolved over time together with their physical manifestations in the brain that reflect their abstract organization albeit in very different ways.
This means that mind and brain, though intimately related, still require distinctly different levels of description and explanation.
Primitive representations in each system are the simplest and are provided in advance as part of our biological inheritance.
Change (development, acquisition, growth) occurs as a result of online processing.
Extremely high levels of activation are associated with phenomena described variously as attention, awareness and consciousness.
Human language development and use comes from product of the online interaction of all cognitive systems.
However, it qualifies as human language by virtue of one, or two (depending the linguistic-theoretical perspective adopted) functionally specialized systems that have evolved specifically to handle linguistic structure.
Each functionally specialized system (module) has a common structure consisting of a store and a processor.
This store/processor combination holds for all systems and is a simple, abstract version of what, in its neural manifestation, can involve multiple locations and pathways in the physical brain.
In a more general sense, WM can be thought of as a combination of all the currently activated representations, each in their individual stores.
Hence a visual representation is called a visual structure and abbreviated as VS. Cognitive systems are linked by interfaces which can be thought of as simple processors that enable the association and coactivation of representations in adjoining systems.
The first, forming an outer ring, consists of the set of perceptual systems that each receive a particular type of raw input (visual, auditory, olfactory etc) from the external environment via the senses and each produce as their output their own cognitive representations of the world outside.
The second set of systems at an inner or deeper level are not connected directly with raw input coming in from the environment.