Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A cognitive architecture is presented, which combines insights from artificial intelligence with cognitive psychology,biology, and linguistics. Using a Super Mario clone, we equipped the simulated agents with (i) motivational behavioral systems,(ii) reasoning and planning capabilities, (iii) event-based schema learning and sensorimotor exploration, and (iv) speech com-prehension and generation mechanisms. The motivational system activates goal events to maintain internal homeostasis. Toinvoke selected events, hierarchical action planning and control unfolds both on an event-schematic and a sensorimotor level.Schema learning is based on the detection of event changes, which are not predicted by the basic sensorimotor forward model.Language is comprehended and generated using context-free grammars linked to the schema-based knowledge structure. Thework offers an approach to develop and thus to ground conceptual, semantic world knowledge in sensorimotor interactions andto couple this knowledge with a language to generate and comprehend language about the agent’s virtual world meaningfully.