Computational and Explanatory Power of Cognitive Architectures : The Case of ACT-R

Cognitive architectures constitute a generally preferable approach to create computational accounts of human cognition. Yet, cognitive architectures are also hard to assess. Following up on and extending the work of Cooper (2007), we further assess the popular cognitive architecture ACT-R in this paper. It turns out that ACT-R fares worse than one may expect both regarding the scope of empirical effects it has been shown to account for and regarding its explanatory power.

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