Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes work towards an object-oriented language for cognitive modeling. Existing modeling languages (such as C, LISP and Prolog) tend to be far removed from the techniques employed by psychologists in developing their theories. In addition, they encourage the confusion of implementation detail necessary for computational completeness with theoretically motivated aspects. The language described here (OOS) has been designed so as to facilitate this theory/implementation separation, while at the same time simplifying the modeling process for computationally non-sophisticated users by providing a set of classes of basic "cognitive" objects. The object classes are tailored to the implementation of functionally modular cognitive models in the box/arrow style. The language is described (in terms of its execution model and its basic classes) before a sketch is given of a simple production system which has been implemented within the language. W e conclude with a discussion of on-going work aimed at extending the coverage of the language and further simplifying the modeling process.