Cognitive Science An Introduction to the Science of the Mind

The chapter considers the overall organization of the mind. In the first section, we look at agent architectures in artificial intelligence, looking at three different architectures for intelligent agents in artificial intelligence to see what distinguishes cognitive agents from simple reflex agents. The second section looks at Fodor's modularity thesis for cognitive architecture. Fodor proposed domain-specific modules for solving particular cognitive problems, while central processing controls higher-level mental operations. In contrast, the massive modularity hypothesis argues that there is no central processing. This hypothesis is based on evolutionary arguments, which we look at in the third section. In the last section, we look at an example of a hybrid architecture developed by John Anderson and his team - ACT-R, which combines the physical symbol system and the connectionist neural networks.