How does ACT-R currently stand as a psychology theory?
ACT-R is designed to be exclusively a cognitive architecture. It has not attempted to make claims within the area of expert systems or artificial intelligence as Soar has. So its success and failures can be examined solely with respect to how well it fits known psychology data, unifies various areas of psychology, and makes novel predictions. ACT-R currently attempts to cover data in memory, attention, visual processing, problem solving, development, learning, and forgetting of declarative knowledge. In these areas, these models are reported in the core literature, and have to be taken seriously indeed. A list of current models is available here. Preliminary work is also going on to model language processing, spatial reasoning, emotions, and conversation. So, not all areas of Newell’s vision for unified theories of cognition are covered yet, but an increasing range of models are being built, and they are starting to be used be a wide range of psychologists. There are several papers com
