Boicho Kokinov


Boicho Kokinov was an associate professor in cognitive science and computer science at the New Bulgarian University and the director of the Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science.
He was the main organizer of the series of the Annual Summer Schools in Cognitive Science from 1994 until his death.

Early life and education

Kokinov received his PhD at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.

Research interests

His research interests included understanding human thinking and memory: analogy-making, problem solving, decision-making, judgment, context, constructive memory, memory distortions, blending of episodes. He developed the DUAL Cognitive Architecture and a number of models based on it: AMBR together with Alexander Petrov, Maurice Grinberg, Georgi Petkov, and Ivan Vankov; JUDGEMAP together with Georgi Petkov. Experimental data has been collected in support of these models: dissimilar episodes can be blended as result of a double analogy with a third episode ; analogical episodes are easier to blend than superficially similar ones ; analogy helps children to do relational mapping and transitive inference ; simple analogies are done automatically and without awareness ; comparing relations in analogy requires parallel mental simulations of body actions ; anxiety restricts analogy generation.

Publications