Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We discuss the capabilities required by intelligent "agents" that must carry out their activities amidst the complexities and uncertainties of the real world. W e consider important challenges faced by resource-constrained agents who must optimize their goal directed actions within environmental and intemal constraints. Any real agent confronts limits on the quality and amount of input information, knowledge of the future, access to relevant material in memory, availability of alternative strategies for achieving its current goals, etc. W e specify a "minimalist" architecture for a resource-constrained agent, based on Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1988) and on the research of Fehling (Fehling & Breese, 1988). W e show how problem-solving and decision-making within such as system adapts to critical resources limitations that confront an agent. These observations provide the basis for our analysis of the functional role of repression in an intelligent agent. W e show that active repression of information and actions might be expected to emerge and play a constructive role in our model of an intelligent, resource-constrained agent.