Situating Cognition within the Virtual World

Abstract

Cognitive architectures and virtual environments have a long history of use within the cognitive science community; however, few studies have sought to combine the use of these technologies to support computational studies into embodied, extended, situated and distributed (EESD) cognition. Here, we explore the extent to which the ACT-R cognitive architecture and the Unity game engine can be used for these purposes. A range of issues are discussed including the respective responsibilities that the cognitive architecture and game engine have for the implementation of specific processes, the extent to which the representational and computational capabilities of cognitive architectures are suited to the modeling of EESD cognitive processes, and the extent to which the kind of embodiment seen in the case of so-called embodied virtual agents resembles that seen in the case of real-world bio-cognitive systems. These issues are likely to inform the focus of future research efforts concerning the integrative use of virtual environments and cognitive architectures for the computational modeling and simulation of EESD cognitive processes.