Incorporating Mental Imagery into a Cognitive Architecture

Humans use mental imagery for various reasons to include recalling past events, reasoning about spatial relationships, simulating future events, and memorizing concepts and facts. Cognitive architectures have traditionally ignored mental imagery, but we have started to explore this phenomenon in the context of Soar. Soar provides the underlying control, memory, and learning mechanisms with mental imagery providing a memory of spatial relationships and object features not explicitly encoded with symbols. This talk will discuss the design of the initial framework and the representation scheme required to support mental imagery in Soar. We will present initial results in the context of a small problem domain.