An Analysis and Comparison of ACT-R and Soar

Abstract

This is a detailed analysis and comparison of the ACT-R and Soar cognitive architectures, including their overall structure, their representations of agent data and metadata, and their associated processing. It focuses on working memory, procedural memory, and long-term declarative memory. I emphasize the commonalities, which are many, but also highlight the differences. I identify the processes and distinct classes of information used by these architectures, including agent data, metadata, and meta-process data, and explore the roles that metadata play in decision making, memory retrievals, and learning.

18 pages, 1 figure. Presented at The Ninth Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS) Conference 2021 (arXiv:2201.06134)