Toward a Soar theory of taking instructions for immediate reasoning tasks
Richard L. Lewis, Allen Newell, Thad A. Polk · 1993
Soar is a theory of human cognition [New89], embodied in a computer system. Soar specifies the cognitive architecture, which is the relatively fixed set of mechanisms that permit goals and knowledge of the task environment to be encoded in memory and brought to bear to produce behavior. Soar is proposed as a unified theory of cognition, and it has been applied to human behavior in a broad spectrum of domains. This paper reports progress in getting Soar to take instructions and organize itself to perform a required task. There are three important reasons for wanting a theory of instructions. First, taking instructions is a domain of cognitive activity, with interesting phenomena and practical importance. Any unified theory of cognition must ultimately provide such a theory. Second, a major issue for psychology has always been the radical underdetermination of theory by data. Though an issue for all sciences, it is particularly irksome for psychology (and the social sciences) because humans bring massive knowledge to a task and dynamically organize themselves accordingly. Instructions to perform tasks are an important instance of such self-organization (e.g., as it takes place in psychological experiments). A theory of how humans take instructions would go some way toward removing what can be called theory degrees of freedom. Instructions are only one source of knowledge that determines behavior, but success in dealing with them