Cognitive Architectures For Conceptual Structures

The book Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine surveyed the state of the art in artificial intelligence and cognitive science in the early 1980s and outlined a cognitive architecture as a foundation for further research and development. The basic ideas stimulated a broad range of research that built on and extended the original topics. This paper reviews that architecture and compares it to four other cognitive architectures with their roots in the same era: Cyc, Soar, Society of Mind, and Neurocognitive Networks. The CS architecture has some overlaps with each of the others, but it also has some characteristic features of its own: a foundation in Peirce's logic and semiotics; a grounding of symbols in Peirce's twin gates of perception and action; and a treatment of logic as a refinement and extension of more primitive mechanisms of language and reasoning. The concluding section surveys the VivoMind Cognitive Architecture, which builds on and extends the original version presented in the CS book.