Understanding ACT-R – an outsiders perspective

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.