Wagner

The Cognitive Calculus is the result of decades of work in artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, and systems engineering. It is a notation we use to model human cogni-tion and to guide our development of a Cognitive Database (CDB), our evolving computer model of human cognition. The Cognitive Calculus acknowledges human memory (labeled as Total Memory, TM) as the central component of human intelligence. TM is composed of all memory subsystems including: short term memory (STM – our working memory), episodic memory (EM – our life history), and abstracted memory (AM – our mental models). The Cognitive Calculus defines the basic element of TM as a memory node (MemNo) along with a set of operations intrinsic to the creation, retrieval, update, and deletion of MemNos. All content in all of TM is a sensory input, an effector activity, a cognitive activity, an abstracted set (T) or an abstracted sequence (Q). This paper describes how a human cognitive system takes the experiences of life in as inputs to STM, passes those inputs through STM into EM, finds patterns in EM for creating abstractions in AM, and then uses those abstractions of the past to comprehend its current experience. The paper ends with guidance concerning the things that must be in a Cognitive Database so that a computer can better model human cognition.