The Soar Cognitive Architecture and Human Working Memory

Abstract

FIVE CENTRAL FEATURES OF THE THEORY From the viewpoint of the Soar cognitive architecture, the term working memory (WM) refers to the psychological mechanisms that maintain information retrieved or created during the performance of a task. The following are the five key points made in the chapter concerning Soar's treatment of human WM: (1) Soar is not specifically a “model of WM,” but rather a cognitive architecture of broad scope, which focuses on the functional capabilities needed for a memory system to support performance in a range of cognitive tasks. The functions of working memory are distributed across multiple components of the architecture, including the longterm production memory. (2) Even in a cognitive architecture with an unbounded dynamic memory, WM limitations can arise on functional grounds. Where such functional accounts exist, they take theoretical priority over capacity-based explanations of WM phenomena. (3) Soar does not currently include any capacity limits on its dynamic memory (SDM), but is compatible with certain such limitations. In particular, a constraint that SDM can hold at most two items of the same “type” (suitably defined) yields a coherent explanation for many psycholinguistic phenomena in the comprehension of sentences. This constraint is motivated by computational efficiency concerns and embodies the general principle of similarity-based interference (Baddeley & Logie, Chapter 2; Cowan, Chapter 3; Schneider, Chapter 10; and O'Reilly, Braver, & Cohen, Chapter 11, all in this volume). […]

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