Abstract
The cognitive architecture ACT-R is very popular in cognitive sciences. It merges well-investigated results of psychology to a unified model of cognition. This enables researchers to implement and execute domain-specific cognitive models. ACT-R is implemented as a production rule system. Although its underlying psychological theory has been investigated in many psychological experiments, ACT-R lacks a formal definition from a mathematical-computational point of view.
In this paper, we present a formalization of ACT-R’s fundamental concepts including an operational semantics of the core features of its production rule system. The semantics abstracts from technical artifacts of the implementation. Due to its abstract formulation, the semantics is eligible for analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this operational semantics is the first of its kind.
Furthermore, we show a formal translation of ACT-R production rules to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) and prove soundness and completeness of the translation mechanism according to our operational semantics.
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Gall, D., Frühwirth, T. (2015). A Formal Semantics for the Cognitive Architecture ACT-R. In: Proietti, M., Seki, H. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17822-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17822-6_5
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