Anigrafs : Experiments in Cooperative Cognitive Architecture Paperback / softback

An innovative proposal for understanding how mental organisms make decisions and control behavior. In this book, Whitman Richards offers a novel and provocative proposal for understanding decision making and human behavior.

Building on Valentino Braitenberg's famous "vehicles," Richards describes a collection of mental organisms that he calls "daemons"-virtual correlates of neural modules.

Daemons have favored choices and make decisions that control behaviors of the group to which they belong, with each daemon preferring a different outcome.

Richards arranges these preferences in graphs, linking similar choices, which thus reinforce each other. "Anigrafs" refers to these two components-animals, or the mental organisms (agents or daemons), and the graphs that show similarity relations.

Together these two components are the basis of a new cognitive architecture.

In Richards's account, a collection of daemons compete for control of the cognitive system in which they reside; the challenge is to get the daemons to agree on one of many choices.

Richards explores the results of group decisions, emphasizing the Condorcet voting procedure for aggregating preferences.

A neural mechanism is proposed. Anigrafs presents a series of group decisions that incorporate simple and complex movements, as well as aspects of cognition and belief.

Anigrafs concludes with a section on "metagrafs," which chart relationships between different anigraf models.