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The Intelligent Distribution Agent (IDA) provides a conceptual (and computational) model of cognition implemented as a software agent. IDA “lives” on a computer system with connections to the Internet and various databases, and does personnel work for the US Navy, performing all the specific personnel tasks of a human. In particular, IDA negotiates with sailors in natural language, deliberates, and makes voluntary action selections in the process of finding new jobs for sailors at the end of their current tour of duty. IDA completely automates the work of Navy personnel agents (detailers). Based on psychological theory, the IDA architecture, used to implement the IDA software agent, models a broad spectrum of human cognitive and affective functioning. In addition to featuring “consciousness,” the architecture accommodates perception, several forms of memory, action-selection, deliberation, and language generation. Based on Global Workspace Theory, IDA's “consciousness” module allows it to select relevant internal resources (behaviours) with which to deal flexibly with both exogenous and endogenous stimuli. The design of the IDA architecture spawns hypotheses concerning human cognition and affect that can serve to guide the research of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. IDA has gradually transitioned from its original role as a detailer into the LIDA technology (Learning-IDA). The LIDA technology will provide cognitive software agents and cognitive robots with four fundamental, continuously active, learning mechanisms that underlie much of human learning: 1) perceptual learning, the learning of new objects, categories, relations, etc., 2) episodic learning of events, the what, where, and when, 3) procedural learning, the learning of new actions and action sequences with which to accomplish new tasks.
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