A Bimodal Cognitive Architecture: Explorations in Architectural Explanation of Spatial Reasoning

Research in Psychology often involves the building of computational models to test out various theories. The usual approach is to build models using the most convenient tool available. Newell has instead proposed building models within the framework of general-purpose cognitive architectures. One advantage of this approach is that in some cases it is possible to provide more perspicuous explanations of experimental results in different but related tasks, as emerging from an underlying architecture. In this paper, we propose the use of a bimodal cognitive architecture called biSoar in modeling phenomena in spatial representation and reasoning. We show biSoar can provide an architectural explanation for the phenomena of simplification that arises in experiments associated with spatial recall. We build a biSoar model for one such spatial recall task – wayfinding, and discuss the role of the architecture in the emergence of simplification.