Cognitive Architecture and Modeling Idiom: An Examination of Three Models of the Wickens's Task

Cooper and Shallice (1995) raise many issues regarding the unified theories of cognition research program in general, and Soar in particular. In this paper, we examine one specific criticism of Newell's (1990) treatment of immediate behavior and use it to explain the notion of the modeling idiom within a cognitive architecture. We compare a dual-task model using Newell's architecture and idiom to two other models that use different architectures and idioms (EPIC and an experimental version of Soar). We also look at the models' dependency on their respective cognitive architectures, and the theory/implementation gap also identified by Cooper and Shallice (1995). Introduction Unified theories of cognition seek to provide a unique, consistent framework for modeling all types of cognitive, perceptual, and motor activities. Several unified theories, or cognitive architectures, have been proposed: among them are Soar (Newell, 1990) , ACT-R (Anderson, 1993) and EPIC (Meyer & Kieras, 1995)...