Multi-Modal Cognitive States: Augmenting the State in Cognitive Architectures

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems

Volume

Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Different streams of AI idealize different aspects of human cognition. Idealization of intelligence as an embodied activity, involving an integration of cognition, perception and the body, places the tightest constraints on the design space for AI artifacts, forcing AI to deeply understand the design tradeoffs and tricks that biology has developed. I propose that a step in the design of such artifacts is to broaden the notion of cognitive state from the current linguistic-symbolic, Language-of-Thought framework to a multi-modal one, where perception and kinesthetic modalities participate in thinking. This is in contrast to the roles assigned to perception and motor activities as modules external to central cognition in the currently dominant theories in AI and Cognitive Science. I develop the outlines of this proposal, and describe the implementation of a bi-modal version in which a diagrammatic representation component is added to the cognitive state.