A refined operational semantics for ACT-R
Daniel Gall, Thom Frühwirth · 2015
The popular cognitive architecture ACT-R is used in many cognitive models to explain cognitive features of human-beings. It has a well-defined psychological theory but lacks a formalization of its underlying computational system. This lack allows for technical ad-hoc artifacts in the original reference implementation. More importantly, formal analysis of cognitive models is not possible without a well-defined semantics. In prior work we have defined an abstract operational semantics for ACT-R's production system that is suitable for model analysis. It abstracts from details like timings and conflict resolution methods. However, to describe the behavior of ACT-R implementations a more refined semantics is needed.