Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Improvisation requires an understanding and application of mechanical objects in broad contexts. The capacity to interpret a situation in terms of an object's capabilities requires the integration of functional and behavioral object representations. A model is presented which describes the integration of causal interactions between these levels of abstraction. The model maintains both intentional and behavioral representations to allow inferencing at each level, but integrates them by applying an infcrencing mapping between the two. This model is used to reason about simple mechanical objects in the domain of improvisational mechanics.