A Formal Model of Script Construction Based on Salience and Abstraction

The role of schemas seems to be crucial in general human cognition. Scripts, as a kind of cognitive schema, seem to be a good model for describing human behavior, and have been applied as formal elements to create computational models. However, a formal model of how scripts are created frow external stimuli has not been proposed yet. This paper proposes a computational process of script acquisition based on activation of perceivable properties. The activation is used to find relations between the abstracted properties and to filter and group stimuli into specific schemas. The output of an implementation of the computational model has been tested against the result of experiments with humans. Overall results indicate that the model is plausible and can be used to describe a number of phenomena related to script acquisition.