Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

n essential component of opportunistic behavior is oppor?tunity recognition, the recognition of those conditions that facilitate the pursuit of some suspended goal. Opportunity recognition is a special case of situation assessment, the pro?cess of sizing up a novel situation. The ability to recognize opportunities for reinstating suspended problem contexts (one way in which goals manifest themselves in design) is crucial to creative design. In order to deal with real world oppor?tunity recognition, we attribute limited inferential power to relevant suspended goals. W e propose that goals suspended in the working memory monitor the internal (hidden) represen?tations of the currently recognized objects. A suspended goal is satisfied when the current internal representation and a sus?pended goal "match". W e propose a computational model for working memory and we compare it with other relevant theo?ries of opportunistic planning. This working memory model is implemented as part of our IMPROVISER system.