Prelims:Gray 1/12/2007 4:53 PM Page v The Rise of Cognitive Architectures

One way forward in studying human behavior is to create computer simulations that perform the tasks that humans perform by simulating the way humans process information. These simulations of behavior, called cognitive models, are theories of the knowledge and the mechanisms that give rise to behavior. The sets of mechanisms are assumed to be fixed across tasks, which allow them to be realized as a reusable computer program that corresponds to the architecture of cognition, or cognitive architecture. (More complete explanations are provided by Newell’s [1990] Unified Theories of Cognition, by Anderson’s ACT-R work [Anderson et al., 2004], and by ongoing work with connectionist and neural architectures.) Because cognitive models increasingly allow us t