A Cognitive Computational Model for Spatial Reasoning

In recent years a lot of psychological research efforts have been made in analyzing human spatial reasoning. Psychologists have used implicitly many spatial cognitive models, i.e. a model of how humans conceptualize spatial information and reason about it, based on the mental model theory to model their experimental findings. But only little effort has been put into identifying from an algorithmic point of view the control mechanism in cognitive models for reasoning with spatial relations. Without having such a specification the task of testing and improving cognitive models seems to be rather difficult, whereas the transfer of such cognitive models with attention to AI systems seems to be even more important. Only a precise computational model defining parameters and operations make testable predictions. In this paper we extend the SRM model, by embedding it into Baddeleys Working Memory Model. By this embedding we can define the role of the central executive and show that this subsystem plays an important role in precising the cognitive attention.