Memory-Centred Architectures: Perspectives on Human-Level Cognitive Competencies

In the context of cognitive architectures, memory is typically considered as a passive storage device with the sole purpose of maintaining and retrieving information relevant to ongoing cognitive processing. If memory is instead considered to be a fundamentally active aspect of cognition, as increasingly suggested by empirically-derived neurophysiological theory, this passive role must be reinterpreted. In this perspective, memory is the distributed substrate of cognition, forming the foundation for cross-modal priming, and hence soft cross-modal coordination. This paper seeks to describe what a cognitive architecture based on this perspective must involve, and initiates an exploration into how human-level cognitive competencies (namely episodic memory, word label conjunction learning, and social behaviour) can be accounted for in such a low-level framework. This proposal of a memory-centred cognitive architecture presents new insights into the nature of cognition, with benefits for computational implementations such as generality and robustness that have only begun to be exploited.