Design of Cognitive Machines

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the design of cognitive machines. These machines and their models were chosen in order to increase and to improve: i. The degree of cognition of the organization, ii. the capability of the organization for information processing and management, and iii. the ability of the organization to make decisions. Therefore Chapter VI introduces the design of cognitive machines with capabilities to carry out complex cognitive tasks in organizations - and in particular the task of decision-making which involves representation and organization of knowledge via concept identification and categorization along with the manipulation of perceptions (or percepts)1, concepts2, and mental models3. The ability of these machines to manipulate a percept provides them with higher levels of information-processing than other symbolic-processing machines4; and according to the theory of levels of processing in cognition (Reed, 1988), these machines can mimic (even through simple models) cognitive processes of humans (Nobre, 2005). Percepts and thus concepts5 (along with mental models) are described by words, propositions and sentences of natural language (Zadeh, 2001).