Scott D. Lathrop, United States Military Academy. John E. Laird, University of Michigan.

Inspired by mental imagery, we present results of extending a symbolic cognitive architecture (Soar) with general computational mechanisms to support reasoning with symbolic, quantitative spatial, and visual depictive representations. Our primary goal is to achieve new capabilities by combining and manipulating these representations using specialized processing units specific to a modality but independent of task knowledge. This paper describes the architecture supporting behavior in an environment where perceptual-based thought is inherent to problem solving. Our results show that imagery provides the agent with additional functional capabilities improving its ability to solve rich spatial and visual problems.