Accounting for Certain Mental Disorders Within a Comprehensive Cognitive Architecture

This paper explores how mental disorders of certain types might be explained based on mechanisms and processes of human motivation (including drives and goals) and action selection (as well as other related mechanisms and processes), within a generic, comprehensive computational cognitive architecture model. It is hypothesized that such mechanisms may capture the relative invariance within an individual in terms of behavioral inclinations (at different times and with regard to different situations, as well as the necessary variability of behaviors). The hypothesis results from the computational cognitive architecture CLARION. Several simulation tests have been conducted that demonstrate that the model is reasonable and captures some characteristics of certain mental disorders (such as certain types of addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder). The work is a first step in showing the feasibility of integrating mental disorders modeling/simulation into a generic cognitive model (i.e., a cognitive architecture).