Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The basic cognitive architecture of the human brain remainsunknown. However, there is evidence for the existence ofdistinct behavioral control systems shared by humans andnonhumans; and there is further evidence pointing to distincthigher-level problem solving systems shared by humans andother primates. To clarify the nature of these proposedsystems and examine how they may interact in the brain, wepresent a four-level model of the primate brain and compareits performance to three other brain models in the face of achallenging foraging problem (i.e., with transparent, and thus,invisible barriers). In all manipulations (e.g., size of problemspace, number of obstacles), our model never performed thebest outright; however, it was always among the best,appearing to be a jack-of-all-trades. Thus, the virtues of ourprimate brain lie not only in the heights of thinking it canreach, but also in its range and versatility.