PRIMs Cognitive Architecture

The problem

In many situations, people are capable of performing novel tasks on the basis of minimal or sometimes no instruction. This is at odds with many models that require the specification of large amounts of task-specific knowledge for tasks. Even then behavior is brittle: if something unexpected happens the model will break down.

The level of Skills

As solution we propose an additional layer of abstraction between operators and task: the level of skills. A skill is the largest set of operators that can be reused between tasks. If a new task has to be performed, and the model has all the underlying skills, performing the new tasks only involves connecting the required skills.

Example: Attentional Blink

Attentional Blink is a good example of a task that most subjects have never done before, but that requires no prior training.

In Hoekstra et al. (2019), we show that a model of the attentional blink can be composed from skills taken from a complex working memory task, and a visual search task.