Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate some aspects of cognition involved in invention, more precisely in the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. We propose the use of the Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) language for the representation of invention knowledge; we claim that because SBF has been shown to support a wide range of reasoning about physical devices, it constitutes a plausible account of how an inventor might represent knowledge of an invention. We further propose the use of the ACT-R architecture for the implementation of this model. ACT-R has been shown to very precisely model a wide range of human cognition. We draw upon the architecture for execution of productions and matching of declarative knowledge through spreading activation. Thus we present a model which combines the well-established cognitive validity of ACT-R with the powerful, specialized model-based reasoning methods facilitated by SBF.