Andrew Barto
barto at cs.umass.edu
(413) 545-2109
Office: CMPS 272
Office hours -Tuesday and Thursday ???, or by appointment

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of artificial intelligence and/or cognitive psychology.

Two books are required:
Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems, Wayne D. Gray, Oxford, 2007 [referred to as WDG]
How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe, John R. Anderson, Oxford, 2007 [referred to as JRA]
We will also be reading a number of papers that can be downloaded.

A cognitive architecture is a type of agent architecture designed to provide a theory for understanding and simulating human cognition. The aim of the designers of cognitive architectures is to improve our understanding of a wide range of human cognitive functions. In this seminar we will study a variety of cognitive architectures in order to understand how they work, what they are able to do, and how they contribute to cognitive science.

This is a graduate seminar. Students will be expected to read each assigned reading before coming to the class at which it will be discussed, and to e-mail to the instructor a short critical review of each reading by the evening of the day before it will be discussed. Each student will be asked to do more intensive independent study on one cognitive architecture and prepare a class presentation on that architecture. Grading will be based on participation in classroom discussion, reliability of handing in critiques (though the critiques themselves will not be graded), and the quality of presentations. There will be no exams.