Towards Incorporating Visual Imagery into a Cognitive Architecture

Abstract

This paper presents a synthesis of cognitive architecture and visual imagery. Visual imagery is a mental process that relies both on cognitive and perceptual mechanisms and is useful for tasks requiring visual-feature and visual-spatial reasoning. Using visual imagery as motivation, we have extended the Soar cognitive architecture to support the construction, transformation, generation, and inspection of visual representations for general problem solving. This paper presents the high-level architectural design and discusses initial results from two domains.