Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive architectures are an advantageous tool for creatingcognitive models. They provide a framework integrating generalcognitive structures and assumptions about the mind as forexample the working memory, structural modularity or theirinterconnections. A vast number of cognitive architectures havebeen developed in the last decades. While the architectures realizethe cognitive perspective, the formal foundation and similaritiesof cognitive architectures remain open. To identify the cognitivesubstrate of the architectures, we propose a generalized cognitiveframework allowing to embed different cognitive architecturesto analyze their properties and to have a common and formalground for comparisons. We demonstrate our approach – as proof-of-concept – by embedding the two most popular architectures,ACT-R and SOAR, and evaluate cognitive models for recognitionmemory in our approach. Potentials and limitations are discussed.