Psychological Validity of Soar

Psychological Validity of Soar

Soar was originally designed as a general engine for the universal weak methods and adopted only the problem space hypothesis from psychology. However, with the addition of the learning mechanism, chunking, which was also based on a psychological phenomena, Soar began to be used as a cognitive model as well as a general, cognitive architecture. In particular, Soar has been very successful at replicating results (and thus demonstrating possible mechanisms) of the power law of practice across different problem domains. This success lead to Newell's proposal that Soar be considered a unified theory of cognition. However, Soar does not cover the full range of human cognitive capability.


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