A GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO SOAR, AN ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMAN COGNITION: 2006 UPDATE
JILL FAIN LEHMAN, JOHN LAIRD, PAUL ROSENBLOOM 1. INTRODUCTION
Many intellectual disciplines contribute to the field of cognitive science: psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few. Cognitive science itself originated in the desire to integrate expertise in these traditionally separate disciplines in order to advance our insight into cognitive phenomena — phenomena like problem solving, decision making, language, memory, and learning. Each discipline has a history of asking certain types of questions and accepting certain types of answers. And that, according to Allen Newell, a founder of the field of artificial intelligence, is both an advantage and a problem. The advantage of having individual disciplines contribute to a study of cognition is that each provides expertise concerning the questions that have been at the focus of its inquiry. Expertise comes in two packages: descriptions of regularities in behavior, and theories that try to explain those regularities. For example, the field of psycholinguistics has been responsible for documenting a regularity called the garden path phenomenon which contrasts sentences such as (a) below, that are very easy for people to understand, with sentences like (b), that are so difficult that most people believe they are ungrammatical (they're not, but their structure leads people to misinterpret them): (a) Without her contributions we failed. (b) Without her contributions failed to come in. In addition to providing examples of garden path sentences and experimental evidence demonstrating that people find them nearly impossible to understand, psycholinguists have also constructed theories of why they are problematic, (e.g. Gibson, 1990; Pritchett, 1988). Indeed, psycholinguists are interested in phenomena like these because they help to constrain theories of how humans understand language; such a theory should predict that people will have problems on sentences like (b) but not on sentences like (a). Psychology has also given us descriptions and theories of robust regularities, i.e. behaviors that all people seem to exhibit. It has contributed regularities about motor behavior (e.g. Fitts' Law (Fitts, 1954)), which predicts how long it will take a person to move a pointer from one place to a target location as a function of the distance to be traveled and the size of the target), about item recognition (e.g. that the time to decide whether a test item was on a memorized list of items increases linearly with the length of the list (Sternberg, 1975)), and about verbal learning (e.g. if an ordered list of items is memorized by repeated exposure, then the items at the ends of the list are learned before the items in the middle of the list (Tulving, 1983)), among others. The other

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