Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In earlier work, we proposed a memory model that would facilitate the detection of opportunities to satisfy suspended goals. In this opportunistic memory model, suspended goals are indexed under feature sets that are predictive of the presence of the opportunity, and which are likely to be encountered in the normal course of future activity. The functional benefit of such encoding depends crucially on the particular vocabulary of features used, the costs of their detection, and the overlap of features relevant to the pursuit of different goals. In this paper we investigate the feature vocabulary implied by recent work on visual search [Treisman, 1985, Tsotsos, 1990], and its use in indexing goals suspended due to the lack of a particular object.