Understanding ACT-R - an Outsider's Perspective
This is an incremental contribution that helps researchers and practitioners understand a foundational cognitive theory for applications like cognitive tutors.
The paper tackles the difficulty of learning the ACT-R theory of cognition due to its scattered literature by providing a tutorial on its core components, aiming to make it accessible to outsiders.
The ACT-R theory of cognition developed by John Anderson and colleagues endeavors to explain how humans recall chunks of information and how they solve problems. ACT-R also serves as a theoretical basis for "cognitive tutors", i.e., automatic tutoring systems that help students learn mathematics, computer programming, and other subjects. The official ACT-R definition is distributed across a large body of literature spanning many articles and monographs, and hence it is difficult for an "outsider" to learn the most important aspects of the theory. This paper aims to provide a tutorial to the core components of the ACT-R theory.