Reading guide: ACT: A Simple Theory of Complex Cognition

Background

Things to watch out for

• What's recursion? It's not important that you know how to do it, but that you get a bit of a sense of what it is and why it's tricky. Really think about about the example rule on the first page, and think about what it means that recursive programming can be modeled with 500 such rules.
• The main claim is on the second page. Fig 1 simply shows that the ACT programming model behaves like humans in terms of how the error rate changes with practice.
• The guts of the architecture start in the Representational Assumptions section. In Fig 2, the shape of the thing doesn't matter, but the collection of related bits does. What's the relation with the first bit on page 357? Really dig in here and in Fig 3, trying to understand how it works.
• The Knowledge Acquisition section talks about learning. This is important stuff. How do these neat little rules get in the model in the first place?
• Next section: How do we use the right knowledge at the right time? Also important. Try to get the gist of Fig 4. Don't worry about memorizing the formulas, but do try to understand what they are saying about the factors that affect knowledge deployment. The rest of the figures here reference various ACT theses which support the cognitive plausibility of ACT. Try to get the overall idea of as many as you can.
• The last section has a nice analogy for cognition. Do you buy it?