A Formal Specification of the Memorization Process

In this chapter we present the formal language, stochastic process algebra (STOPA), to specify cognitive systems. In addition to the usual characteristics of these formalisms, this language features the possibility of including stochastic time. This kind of time is useful to represent systems where the delays are not controlled by fixed amounts of time, but are given by probability distribution functions. In order to illustrate the usefulness of our formalism, we will formally represent a cognitive model of the memory. Following contemporary theories of memory classification (see Squire et al., 1993; Solso, 1999) we consider sensory buffer, short-term, and long-term memories. Moreover, borrowing from Y. Wang and Y. Wang (2006), we also consider the so-called action buffer memory.