ACT-R

ACT-R (pronounced act-ARE; short for "Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational") is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.
Most of the ACT-R basic assumptions are also inspired by the progress of cognitive neuroscience, and ACT-R can be seen and described as a way of specifying how the brain itself is organized in a way that enables individual processing modules to produce cognition.
Inspiration
ACT-R has been inspired by the work of Allen Newell, and especially by his lifelong championing the idea of unified theories as the only way to truly uncover the underpinnings of cognition. In fact, John Anderson usually credits Allen Newell as the...