Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)In this paper, we introduce the Cognitive Systems Toolkit (CST) and its underlying CST Reference Cognitive Architecture. CST is a general toolkit for the construction of cognitive architectures, which reties on a set of concepts which are familiar to many other cognitive architecture and constitute CST's core. This core is general enough such that problem-specific cognitive architectures might be generated by using CST. At the same time, CST specify a more general Reference Cognitive Architecture, which is a reference model for the construction of application specific cognitive architectures. Differently from other Cognitive Architectures available in the literature, which are computational frameworks, CST is a tootkit, which means more flexibility in choosing specific techniques and algorithms for setting up the application architecture. After presenting the architecture core, we develop an illustrative example showing how CST can be used to implement a simple subsumption architecture in a robotic application. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.173248CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico)CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeioamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior)FAPESP (Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)