Knowledge and reasoning supported by cognitive maps

Abstract

A powerful and useful approach for modeling knowledge and qualitative reasoning is the Cognitive Map. The background of Cognitive Maps is the research about learning environments carried out by Cognitive Psychology since the nineteenth century. Along the last thirty years, these underlying findings inspired the development of computational models to deal with causal phenomena. So, a Cognitive Map is a structure of concepts of a specific domain that are related through cause-effect relations with the aim to simulate behavior of dynamic systems. In spite of the short life of the causal Cognitive Maps, nowadays there are several branches of development that focus on qualitative, fuzzy and uncertain issues. With this platform wide spectra of applications have been developing in fields like game theory, information analysis and management sciences. Wherefore, with the purpose to promote the use of this kind of tool, in this work is surveyed three branches of Cognitive Maps; and it is outlined one application of the Cognitive Maps for the student modeling that shows a conceptual design of a project in progress. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.