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Toward a Unified View of Cognitive Control
Author(s) -
Salvucci Dario D.,
Taatgen Niels A.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2011.01134.x
Subject(s) - cognitive architecture , cognition , cognitive science , lida , task (project management) , human multitasking , control (management) , computer science , cognitive psychology , task switching , psychology , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , engineering , systems engineering
Allen Newell (1973) once observed that psychology researchers were playing “twenty questions with nature,” carving up human cognition into hundreds of individual phenomena but shying away from the difficult task of integrating these phenomena with unifying theories. We argue that research on cognitive control has followed a similar path, and that the best approach toward unifying theories of cognitive control is that proposed by Newell, namely developing theories in computational cognitive architectures. Threaded cognition, a recent theory developed within the ACT‐R cognitive architecture, offers promise as a unifying theory of cognitive control that addresses multitasking phenomena for both laboratory and applied task domains.