The CAPS Family of Cognitive Architectures
Sashank Varma · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
Over the past 30 years, the CAPS family of architectures has illuminated the constraints that shape human information processing. These architectures have supported models of complex forms of cognition ranging from problem solving to language comprehension to spatial reasoning to human–computer interaction to dual-tasking. They have offered pioneering explanations of individual differences in the normal range and group differences in clinical populations such as people with autism. They have bridged the divide between the mind and brain, providing unified accounts of the behavioral data of cognitive science and the brain imaging data of cognitive neuroscience. This chapter traces the development of the CAPS family of architectures, identifying the key historical antecedents, highlighting the computational and empirical forces that drove each new version, and describing the operating principles of the current architecture and the dynamic patterns of information processing displayed by its models. It also delineates directions for future research.