Cognitive Machinery and Behaviors

We present a functional model based on the articulation of three information processing systems that aim to model the sensorimotor cycle realized by the cognitive system of Man. To establish this bio-inspired model, we use the formalism of information processing systems introduced in the 1950s by John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing, to characterize the cooperation of a set of heterogeneous systems in system of systems. This theoretical work uses the different studies conducted in Artificial Intelligence (connectionist models and symbolic models), in Cognitive Psychology (models describing decision-making in limited rationality) and in Neurobiology (experimental models on free will) to propose a systemic and extended approach of the human cognitive apparatus. Moreover, this modeling is based on the hypothesis according to which the conscious mechanisms emerge automatically from an unconscious activity, and from its computational counterpart, namely the possibility to make a symbolic logic emerge from the activity of a connectionist mechanism. The architecture that we have named IPSEL (Information Processing Systems with Emergent Logic), while it can not be considered as a theory of the mind, has the usefulness of being able to explain some empirical observations that we also present. Finally, the implications and limitations of such a model and the research that is being carried out to present its usefulness and likelihood as a model of the human cognitive system as part of the questions of trust in the decisions provided by automatic system.