Collaborative Research Center 378

Resource-adaptive cognitive processes

Since the beginning of 1996, a collaborative research center at the University of Saarbrücken has been investigating the adaptation of cognitive processes to limited resources. More than 50 scientists from philosopy, psychology, computer science and computational linguistics participate in interdisciplinary collaboration within 11 projects. A close cooperation between the disciplines involved is guaranteed by the overall conception of the research center and by collaboration between representatives of different disciplines even within individual projects.

The central topics of this this research center are:

• heuristics that can be seen as results of the adaptation to resource limitations - whether through natural evolution, in the case of humans, or through artificial construction, in the case of computational systems.
• the construction and analysis of resource control in cognitive processes; and
• the question of how resource-adaptivity can be represented, analyzed, and constructed within the paradigm of concurrent computation.

With this perspective, approaches to modeling can be adopted and extended which are considerably more realistic than conventional cognitive models. Scientific issues that arise in diverse research contexts are combined in new ways via reference to the central topic of the resource-adaptivity of cognitive processes. This topic is currently receiving a great deal attention in various disciplines. For example, previously, in artificial intelligence limitations of resources such as time, memory, and processing capacity were typically abstracted away from; more recently, especially in connection with real-time applications, explicit models of resource-adaptivity have been discussed.

The research center integrates different research traditions with regard to the topic of resource adaptivity within a unified perspective. A further innovative component is the atempt to replace the traditional conception of computation by the concept of concurrent computation, which can serve as a more general basis for the study of resource-adaptive cognitive processes.