Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Modeling cognitive processes is one of the major tasks of cognitive science. This work presents a model of a studydescribed in Flexible Strategy Use in Young Childrens Tic-Tac-Toe (Crowley & Siegler, 1993) in which the authorsmade an attempt to characterize decision-making in a conflict-of-interests-like environment. In the experiments, kinder-garten/primary school children and an algorithm-based opponent played a series of games in Tic-Tac-Toe. The outcomesseemed to indicate the existence of a hierarchy of rules that is constructed with experience. Although already tested al-gorithmically, the simulation detailed in the paper was applicable to a narrow class of problems only. The model shownin this work was built using a cognitive architecture, i.e. computer-based structure mimicking the general functioning ofthe human mind. Concretely, we used a rule-based system Soar that operates in mental rules paradigm and in most partreplicated the results of the mentioned study.