ACT-R

ACT-R (pronounced act-ARE; short for "Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational") is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.

Most of the ACT-R basic assumptions are also inspired by the progress of cognitive neuroscience, and ACT-R can be seen and described as a way of specifying how the brain itself is organized in a way that enables individual processing modules to produce cognition.

ACT-R has been inspired by the work of Allen Newell, and especially by his lifelong championing the idea of unified theories as the only way to truly uncover the underpinnings of cognition. In fact, John Anderson usually credits Allen Newell as the major source of influence over his own theory.

Like other influential cognitive architectures (including Soar, CLARION, and EPIC), the ACT-R theory has a computational implementation as an interpreter of a special coding language. The interpreter itself is written in Common Lisp, and might be loaded into any of the Common Lisp language distributions.

This means that any researcher may download the ACT-R code from the ACT-R website, load it into a Common Lisp distribution, and gain full access to the theory in the form of the ACT-R interpreter.

Also, this enables researchers to specify models of human cognition in the form of a script in the ACT-R language. The language primitives and data-types are designed to reflect the theoretical assumptions about human cognition. These assumptions are based on numerous facts derived from experiments in cognitive psychology and brain imaging.