Customer Reviews

The Atomic Components of Thought

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This book presents the latest version of ACT-R, which is at present the most elaborated and most widely applied formal model of human memory and complex cognitive performance. Anderson's ACT-R theory is the sort of theory Cognitive Science should aim at: comprehensive, compact and elegant. This book not only describes the theory, but also shows it is successful in many different domains of cognitive sience.

Along with Unified Theories of Cognition by Newell, 4CAPS by Thibadeau et al., and EPIC by Kieras, The Atomic Components of Thought by Anderson and Lebiere (Eds.) is foundational reading for anyone interested in graduate studies and research in the area of cognitive architectures. This text is a detailed treatise on this architecture at the time of writing and includes how ACT-R attempts to address aspects of cognition related to problem solving, representation, learning, memory, perception, attention, and behaviour. The major novelty of approach is the use of declarative memory propositions and chunks, procedural memory production rules. For the curious, "ACT-R" does not stand for "Atomic Components of Thought"! The most up-to-date advances in ACT-R theory can be found on the ACT-R website.

I know Anderson is supposed to be one of the great thinkers in thought but I take issue with his title..If you're going to name a book Atomic Components of x, then you need to offer something resembling atomic components???? For example, physics gives us atoms, quarks, leptons, etc. Chemistry the Periodic Table of Elements...Are "memory," "knowledge representation," "performance," "learning," "the visual interface," or any of Anderson's other chapters really atomic components. These all seem to be large, general concepts rather than atomic, "unsplittable" componenentry...The book itself is worth the read for academics and the like but if you judge a book by its title, Anderson misses the mark.