Architectures with procedural representations encode how to do some task. In other words, procedural knowledge is skill knowledge. A simple example of human procedural knowledge is the ability to ride a bike. The specifics of bicycle-riding may be difficult to articulate but one can perform the task. One advantage of procedural representations is possibly faster usage in a performance system. Productions are a common means of representing procedural knowledge.
Procedural knowledge representation contrasts with declarative, which stores knowledge in a more flexible but harder to immediately use format.
Use of procedural knowledge in an agent raises the questions of whether the agent can "know what it knows" and the issue of penetrability of the knowledge. Use of this knowledge may not preclude the agent from this form of meta-knowledge and it certainly does not imply cognitive impenetrability. That the agent can demonstrate that it "knows what it knows" is illustrated in a Soar system which includes the ability to explain its actions. Cognitive impenetrability is not implied because for any operator learned, new, improved operators can be learned along with preference rules that lead to the emergence of cognitive penetrability. The precise bits corresponding to the original operator are neither understood nor changed, but the behavior exhibited by the operator has been penetrated.
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