Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In a recent paper, Laird, Lebiere, and Rosenbloom (2017)highlight how 40 years of research on cognitive architectureshas begun to yield a dramatic convergence of different ap-proaches towards a set of basic assumptions that they calledthe “Standard Model of the Mind” (SMM), in analogy to theStandard Model of particle physics. The SMM was designedto capture a consensus view of “human-like minds”, whetherfrom AI or cognitive science, which if valid must also be trueof the human brain. Here, we provide a preliminary test ofthis hypothesis based on a re-analysis of fMRI data from fourtasks that span a wide range of cognitive functions and cog-nitive complexity, and are representative of the specific formof intelligence and flexibility that is associated with higher-level human cognition. Using an established method (DynamicCausal Modeling) to examine functional connectivity betweenbrain regions, the SMM was compared against two alternativemodels that violate either functional or structural assumptionsof the SMM. The results show that, in every dataset, the SMMsignificantly outperforms the other models, suggesting that theSMM best captures the functional requirements of brain dy-namics in fMRI data among these alternatives.