The Cognitive Process of Comprehension: A Formal Description

Abstract

Comprehension is an ability to understand the meaning of a concept or an action. Comprehension is an important intelligent power of abstract thought and reasoning of humans or intelligent systems. It is highly curious to explore the internal process of comprehension in the brain and to explain its basic mechanisms in cognitive informatics and computational intelligence. This paper presents a formal model of the cognitive process of comprehension. The mechanism and process of comprehension are systematically explained with its conceptual, mathematical, and process models based on the Layered Reference Model of the Brain (LRMB) and the Object-Attribute-Relation (OAR) model for internal knowledge representation. Contemporary denotational mathematics such as concept algebra and Real-Time Process Algebra (RTPA) are adopted in order to formally describe the comprehension process and its interaction with other cognitive processes of the brain.