Adaptive Control of Thought
The Basic Idea
The Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) is a theory about cognition and memory. Over the years, it has evolved and its most recent version is iterated as ACT-R, with the added letter standing in for ‘Rational’. According to ACT theory, we can create a model of the human brain through which we can analyze and predict human behavior, most recently based on the idea that people act rationally. ACT-R is therefore a cognitive architecture that maps out the functions of our higher cognitive processes to demonstrate how people process information and then act accordingly.1
ACT posits that multiple higher cognitive processes have the same underlying system; all of our thoughts, no matter what kind of thought it is, arises as a result of the same brain function. One of its most central tenets is that knowledge be divided into two kinds: declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge.2
We know that human agents tend to be generally well-adapted to their environment, and hence a careful analysis of the cognitive task encountered by the mind, coupled with an assumption of the optimality of human behavior, results in a putatively powerful methodology of prediction and explanation.
– Samuli Reijula, professor in philosophy at the University of Helsinki, in his paperThe Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home “What, when and how do rational analysis models explain?”1
