Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Certain general characteristics of human cognition may be due to properties of the functional architecture of the cognitive processor. While proposed cognitive architectures are almost always "universal" and can be forced to execute arbitrarily chosen computations, nonetheless It Is possible to delineate a class of "compliant" processes that allow the architecture of the processor to influence the course of processing. A speculative case is made that such compliant processing is responsible for invariants of human cognition, such as that problem solving occurs as heuristic search in a problem space, that long-term memory search takes place in cycles of retrieval and re-description, and that uncertain information is dealt with by prominence heuristics.