Modeling Invention by Analogy in ACT-R

We investigate some aspects of cognition involved in invention, more precisely in the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. We propose the use of the Structure-BehaviorFunction (SBF) language for the representation of invention knowledge; we claim that because SBF has been shown to support a wide range of reasoning about physical devices, it constitutes a plausible account of how an inventor might represent knowledge of an invention. We further propose the use of the ACT-R architecture for the implementation of this model. ACT-R has been shown to very precisely model a wide range of human cognition. We draw upon the architecture for execution of productions and matching of declarative knowledge through spreadingactivation. Thus we present a model which combines the well-established cognitive validity of ACT-R with the powerful, specialized model-based reasoning methods facilitated by SBF.