Accounting for Creativity Within a Psychologically Realistic Cognitive Architecture - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 147

the CLARION cognitive architecture, is briefly explained. Fourth, we present a
summary of phenomena that are captured by the EII theory and simulated by
CLARION. Fifth, going beyond EII, we examine the relevance of motivation, person-
ality, emotion, and social interaction to creative problem solving, and howCLARION
may account for them. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages of using
integrative frameworks (such as cognitive architectures) in AI and cognitive science.
8.2 Why Is a Cognitive Architecture Important?
In cognitive science as well as in AI, a cognitive architecture is the specification
of the essential structures, mechanisms, and processes in the form of a domain-
generic computational cognitive model, which can be used for a broad, multiple-
level, multiple-domain analysis of cognition and behavior [ 28 ]. Its function is to
provide a framework to facilitate more detailed modeling and understanding of var-
ious components and processes of the mind. In this way, a cognitive architecture
serves as an initial set of assumptions to be used for further development of models
and theories.
While there are all kinds of “cognitive architectures” in existence, we focus specif-
ically on psychologically oriented cognitive architectures (as opposed to software
engineering oriented ones). For cognitive science, the importance of such cognitive
architectures lies in the fact that they are highly useful to understanding the human
mind in many ways. Researchers who use cognitive architectures must specify cogni-
tive mechanisms in sufficient detail to allow the resulting models to be implemented
on computers and run as simulations. While it is true that more specialized, nar-
rowly scoped models may also serve this purpose, they are not as generic and as
comprehensive and therefore do not provide as unified accounts [ 26 , 28 ].
For the fields of AI, the importance of cognitive architectures lies in the fact that
they support its central goal—building artificial systems that are as capable as human
beings (or more). Cognitive architectures help to reverse engineer the only truly intel-
ligent system around currently—the human mind. The use of cognitive architectures
in building intelligent systems may also facilitate the interaction between humans
and artificially intelligent systems because of the similarity between humans and
cognitively/psychologically grounded intelligent systems.
8.3 The CLARION Cognitive Architecture
CLARION [ 26 , 31 - 33 ] is an integrative, comprehensive cognitive architecture con-
sisting of a number of distinct subsystems for distinct psychological functionalities,
with a dual representational structure in each subsystem (implicit versus explicit
representations).