Anatomy of the Mind ─ Exploring Psychological Mechanisms and Processes With the Clarion Cognitive Architecture

This book aims to understand human cognition and psychology through a comprehensive computational theory of the human mind, namely, a computational "cognitive architecture" (or more specifically, the CLARION cognitive architecture). The goal of this work is to develop a unified framework for understanding the human mind, and within the unified framework, to develop process-based, mechanistic explanations of a large variety of psychological phenomena.

Specifically, the book first describes the essential CLARION framework and its cognitive-psychological justifications, then its computational instantiations, and finally its applications to capturing, simulating, and explaining various psychological phenomena and empirical data. The book shows how the models and simulations shed light on psychological mechanisms and processes through the lens of a unified framework.

In fields ranging from cognitive science, to psychology, to artificial intelligence, and even to philosophy, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and practitioners of various kinds may have interest in topics covered by this book. The book may also be suitable for seminars or courses, at graduate or undergraduate levels, on cognitive architectures or cognitive modeling (i.e. computational psychology).

Dr. Ron Sun is Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A well-known cognitive scientist, Ron Sun explores the fundamental structures of the human mind. He aims for the synthesis of many intellectual ideas into a coherent model of the human mind. The goal is to come up with a cognitive architecture that captures a variety of psychological processes and provides unified explanations of a wide range of data and phenomena.