Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In order to ground our understanding of cognitive development we have started to create a model of how children and adults solve a well-studied three-dimensional puzzle. We started with a model that fits the adult behaviour on the puzzle. We then modified the model's cognitive architecture (ACT-R) and its perceptual/motor architecture (the Nottingham Interaction Architecture) in three ways to simulate a younger problem solver by: (a) reducing the accuracy of vision, (b) reducing working memory, and (c) doing both. The modifications, particularly reduced working memory (and its combination with reduced visual accuracy), allow the model to approximate, on some measures, the behaviour of seven year olds on the puzzle. The results suggest that cognitive models and their architectures can help answer the question of "What develops?".