A Standard Model of the Mind: Toward a Common Computational Framework across Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Robotics

A standard model captures a community consensus over a coherent region of science, serving as a cumulative reference point for the field that can provide guidance for both research and applications, while also focusing efforts to extend or revise it. Here we propose developing such a model for humanlike minds, computational entities whose structures and processes are substantially similar to those found in human cognition. Our hypothesis is that cognitive architectures provide the appropriate computational abstraction for defining a standard model, although the standard model is not itself such an architecture. The proposed standard model began as an initial consensus at the 2013 AAAI Fall Symposium on Integrated Cognition, but is extended here via a synthesis across three existing cognitive architectures: ACT-R, Sigma, and Soar. The resulting standard model spans key aspects of structure and processing, memory and content, learning, and perception and motor; highlighting loci of architectural agreement as well as disagreement with the consensus while identifying potential areas of remaining incompleteness. The hope is that this work will provide an important step towards engaging the broader community in further development of the standard model of the mind.