Revisiting Interacting Subsystems Accounts of Cognitive Architecture: The Emergence of Control and Complexity in an Algebra Task

Abstract. Symbolic accounts of cognitive architecture most often have a central hub where information is processed (e.g. the production process in ACT-R [1]). An alternative approach is to model cognition as the interaction of multiple largely autonomous subsystems [2, 3]. This latter, Interacting Subsystems, ap-proach is explored in the GLAM-PS cognitive architecture, a theory that opera-tionalizes many of the assumptions of strongly grounded approaches to cogni-tion [4]. The GLAM-PS model of problem solving in algebra is described. Control in the algebra model is passed between three subroutines when solving a problem. These subroutines emerge from the interaction of different subsys-tems and are not explicitly programmed into the model. By systematically var-ying two short-term memory parameters it is shown that the model’s successful performance of the task depends on the interaction of the contributing modules, and that this interaction demonstrates complexity, with additional memory re-sources not always improving performance