Enhancing intelligent agents with episodic memory

For a human, episodic memory is a memory of past experiences that one gains over a lifetime. While episodic memory appears critical to human function, researchers have done little to explore the potential benefits for an artificially intelligent agent. In this research, we have added a task-independent, episodic memory to a cognitive architecture. To frame the research, we propose that episodic memory supports a set of cognitive capabilities that improve an agent’s ability to sense its environment, reason, and learn. We demonstrate that episodic memory enables agents created with our architecture to employ these cognitive capabilities. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.