This paper discusses our views on the future of the field of cognitive architectures, and how the scientific questions that define it should be addressed. We also report on a set of requirements, and a related architecture design, that we are currently investigating as part of the CoSy project. 1 What Are Architectures? The first problem we face as researchers in the field of cognitive architectures is defining exactly what we are studying. This is important because the term “architecture ” is so widely used in modern technological fields. An agent’s cognitive architecture defines the information-processing components within the “mind ” of the agent, and how these components are structured in relation to each other. Also, there is a close link between architectures and the mechanisms and representations used within them (where