Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past research on action planning has shed light on the neuralmechanisms underlying the selection of simple motor actions,along with the cognitive mechanisms underlying the planningof action sequences in constrained problem solving domains.We extend this research by describing a neural model thatrapidly plans action sequences in relatively unconstrained do-mains by manipulating structured representations of objectsand the actions they typically afford. We provide an analysisthat indicates our model is able to reliably accomplish goalsthat require correctly performing a sequence of up to 5 actionsin a simulated environment. We also provide an analysis ofthe scaling properties of our model with respect to the num-ber of objects and affordances that constitute its knowledgeof the environment. Using simplified simulations we find thatour model is likely to function effectively while picking from10,000 actions related to 25,000 objects.