Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

With few exceptions, architectural approaches to modeling cognition have historically emphasized what happens in the mind following the transduction of environmental signals into percepts. To our knowledge, none of these architectures implements a sophisticated, general theory of human attention. In this paper we summarize progress to date on a new cognitive architecture called ARCADIA that gives a central role to attention in both perception and cognition. First, we give an overview of the architecture, comparing it to other approaches when appropriate. Second, we present a model of incremental object construction and property binding in ARCADIA using the well known change blindness phenomena to illustrate the time course of object perception and its dependence on attention. Finally, we discuss near-term challenges and future plans