CoJACK: A High-Level Cognitive Architecture with Demonstrations of Moderators, Variability, and Implications for Situation Awareness

We report a high-level architecture, CoJACK, that provides insights on behavior variability, situation awareness, and behavioral moderators. CoJACK combines Beliefs/Desires/Intentions (BDI) agents’ high-level knowledge representation and usability with several aspects of low level cognitive architectures, including processing time predictions, errors, and traceability. CoJACK explores new areas for cognitive architectures, such as variability arising from moderators. It also allows aspects of situation awareness (SA) in a cognitive architecture to be explored. Its behavior and the effects of moderators on behavior are demonstrated in a simple adversarial environment. It provides lessons for other architectures including how to define, measure, and control variability due to individual and temporal aspects of cognition; the importance of SA and knowledge representations necessary to support complex SA; the potential for parameter sweeps and paths as measures of variability; and some of the complexities that will arise when aspects of moderators and SA are added to cognitive architectures.