While traditional appraisal models have been successful tools for describing and formalizing the behavior of emotional agents, they have little to say about the functional realization of affect and emotion within the cognitive processing of these agents. The cognitive architecture MicroPsi addresses emotion and motivation by defining pre-requisites over which affective dynamics and goal-seeking...

In this reply to commentaries on the Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) paper, we not only reemphasize the importance of randomized, controlled experimental tests of competing instructional procedures, but also indicate that altering one variable at a time is an essential feature of a properly controlled experiment. Furthermore, we also emphasize that variable must be relevant to the issue at...

This research is concerned with the innate predispositions underlying human intentional communication. Human communication is currently defined as a circular and overt attempt to modify a partner’s mental states. This requires each party involved to possess the ability to represent and understand the other’s mental states, a capability which is commonly referred to as mindreading, or theory of ...

Transfer is the ability to employ knowledge acquired in one task to improve performance in another. We study transfer in the context of the ICARUS cognitive architecture, which supplies diverse capabilities for execution, inference, planning, and learning. We report on an extension to ICARUS called representation mapping that transfers structured skills and concepts between disparate tasks that...

According to the dual systems model, adolescence is a period of imbalance between cognitive and motivational systems that results in increased tendency towards risk. In the study, we investigated the effects of rewards on risk-taking and cognitive control in 90 adolescents (13-16) and 96 adults (1835). Our results challenge the assumptions of the model as we observed that rewards lead adolescen...

We consider dual-role exchange markets, where traders can offer to both buy and sell the same commodity in the exchange but, if they transact, they can only be either a buyer or a seller, which is determined by the market mechanism. To design desirable mechanisms for such exchanges, we show that existing solutions may not be incentive compatible, and more importantly, cause the market maker to ...

This paper describes how a cognitive architecture builds a spatial model and navigates from it without a map. Each constructed model is a collage of spatial affordances that describes how the environment has been sensed and traversed. The system exploits the evolving model while it directs an agent to explore the environment. Effective models are learned quickly during travel. Moreover, when co...

We introduce the Xapagy cognitive architecture: a software system designed to perform narrative reasoning. The architecture has been designed from scratch to model and mimic the activities performed by humans when witnessing, reading, recalling, narrating and talking about stories.

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This paper introduces a novel sentence processing model that consists of a parser augmented with a probabilistic logic-based model of coreference resolution, which allows us to simulate how context interacts with...