This article explores the view that computational models of cognition may constitute valid theories of cognition, often in the full sense of the term ‘‘theory”. In this discussion, this article examines various (existent or possible) positions on this issue and argues in favor of the view above. It also connects this issue with a number of other relevant issues, such as the general relationship...

Sustained attention is necessary in a variety of real-world settings, from baggage screeners and air traffic controllers to lifeguards and drivers on highways. Individual differences in performance on these tasks are prevalent, leading to questions about the sources of these differences. In this paper we compare the behavior of computational models to empirical data to evaluate the validity of ...

This paper presents a computational cognitive model of the construction process of complex, i.e., multi-part, visual mental images. The model is integrated into the cognitive architecture Casimir. The construction process is realized by the interplay of a spatial working memory structure and a passive quasi-pictorial visual representation. Both structures are successively build up on demand fro...

This paper presents an approach to modeling social transgressions in agent based systems. The approach is intended to be abstract enough that it may be used with many different theories of transgression, apology, forgiveness, etc. We discuss an implementation of this approach in PMFserv, an agent based socio-cognitive modeling framework.

We address the problem of predicting how people will spontaneously divide into groups a set of novel items. This is a process akin to perceptual organization. We therefore employ the simplicity principle from perceptual organization to propose a simplicity model of unconstrained spontaneous grouping. The simplicity model predicts that people would prefer the categories for a set of novel items ...

We are interested in developing a computational model of Piaget’s theory of sensorimotor intelligence. The main difficulty is that Piaget’s theory is quite vague. We analyse existing approaches and find that they model some of the major features of his theory, but that these are not adequate to account for the stage transitions which Piaget described. Instead of copying features of his theory w...

Episodic memory provides a mechanism for accessing past experiences and has been relatively ignored in computational models of cognition. In this paper, we present a framework for describing the functional stages for computational models of episodic memory: encoding, storage, retrieval and use of the retrieved memories. We present two implementations of a computational model of episodic memory ...

We investigate a general cognitive model of group behaviors, based on Festinger’s social comparison theory (SCT), a prominent social psychology theory. We describe two possible implementations of SCT process at an architectural level, on the basis of the Soar cognitive architecture. The first, which seems to follow directly from Festinger’s social comparison theory, treats the SCT process as an...

The mind integrates cognitive and perceptual processes that are currently best modeled using many different computational mechanisms. These are difficult to integrate into a single cognitive model and are thus a challenge to developing a unified model of human cognition. This paper presents two computational principles that identify common elements among these mechanisms and uses these principl...

In this work we want to provide a tool for handling information coming from different information sources. In fact the real world we often have to deal with different sources asserting different things and, in order to decide, it is necessary to consider properly each of them trying to put this information together. According to us, a good way to do it is exploiting the concept of trust. In fac...