Representational Issues in the Debate on the Standard Model of the Mind
This addresses foundational representational challenges in cognitive science, but it is incremental as it critiques and suggests improvements without presenting new empirical results.
The paper discusses representational issues in the Standard Model of the Mind debate, focusing on problems in declarative memories of current Cognitive Architectures and suggests Conceptual Spaces as a potential solution, while analyzing differences in SOAR, ACT-R, and Sigma.
In this paper we discuss some of the issues concerning the Memory and Content aspects in the recent debate on the identification of a Standard Model of the Mind (Laird, Lebiere, and Rosenbloom in press). In particular, we focus on the representational models concerning the Declarative Memories of current Cognitive Architectures (CAs). In doing so we outline some of the main problems affecting the current CAs and suggest that the Conceptual Spaces, a representational framework developed by Gardenfors, is worth-considering to address such problems. Finally, we briefly analyze the alternative representational assumptions employed in the three CAs constituting the current baseline for the Standard Model (i.e. SOAR, ACT-R and Sigma). In doing so, we point out the respective differences and discuss their implications in the light of the analyzed problems.