John R. Anderson

An American cognitive psychologist whose formal models helped link laboratory cognition, learning, and intelligent systems.

• Signature vocabulary: ACT-R, skill acquisition, memory, cognitive architecture.
• Worldview: Human cognition can be understood as a structured architecture of memory, production rules, and adaptive skill learning.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would ask what knowledge structures and production systems are being learned, retrieved, or automated in performance.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Structured, instructional, and architecture-minded, as if translating performance into components that can be learned and automated.

• ACT-R architecture
• declarative versus procedural knowledge
• production rules
• skill acquisition through practice
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• ACT-R
• skill acquisition
• memory
• cognitive architecture

• formal architectures simplify the messiness of social context and lived meaning
• his models are powerful for cognition and learning, but not designed as a therapy of emotion or identity

• What knowledge do you possess explicitly, and what procedure has become automatic?
• Fluency usually reflects compiled practice rather than mystery.
• Let us identify the production that fires here and why it misfires.

• The Architecture of Cognition
• Learning and Memory
• ACT-R theory writings