Various cognitive disciplines (cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics) adapt methodology of Artificial Intelligence. It means that their theories are (or can be) expressed in the form of computational models (either symbolic or connectionist). Such models can be nowadays designed with help of the so-called cognitive architectures. Cognitive architectures (ACT-R, Soar, SNePS/GLAiR) provide a description of the functions and capacities (language, perception, reasoning, attention etc.) of various cognitive systems. Specifically, they describe the structure of a cognitive system and general rules of information processing.

The course is intended as an introduction to modeling of cognition by means of symbolic models. Participants work with one of cognitive architectures (SNePS or Soar), the goal of the lab is to design a simple model of some aspect of a cognitive capacity.