Will Dreams Come True? Review of The Atomic Components of Thought, by John R. Anderson and Christian Lebiere

Abstract John R. Anderson is a distinguished researcher of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, whose work has helped shape these fields for more than 20 years. He is the Walter VanDyke Bingham Professor of Cognitive Science and a professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he has taught since 1978. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1972 and has been a junior fellow at the University of Michigan and assistant, associate, and full professor at Yale University. He is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and has been the President of the Cognitive Science Society (1988–1989). Anderson has received the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Career Award. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has completed close to 300 publications, including several monographs and co-authored books. His research goal is to understand how people organize knowledge that they acquire from their diverse experiences to produce intelligent behavior. The concern is very much with how it is all put together and this has led to the focus on what are called “unified theories of cognition.”  Christian Lebiere is a research scientist in the Human–Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science from the Universite de Liege, Belgium (1986), and a M.S. (1990) and Ph.D. (1998) in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are cognitive architectures and their applications to psychology, artificial intelligence, economics, decision theory, and human–computer interaction. He has published several journal articles and conference papers on these topics.  The reviewer, Franz Schmalhofer, is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Osnabrueck. He has received a Ph.D. in 1982 in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Heidelberg (1982–1984), an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and at McGill University (1984–1989), and a research group leader and senior scientist at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Kaiserslautern (1989–2000). In 1996 he was awarded the venia legendi for teaching psychology at the University of Heidelberg. He published a book entitled Constructive Knowledge Acquisition in 1998 and has additional publications on text comprehension, problem solving, memory, decision making, artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and knowledge management