Chapter 1 Questions and Answers

Why is there the “top level” in Clarion? Cognitively speaking, we need to capture the explicit knowledge that humans do exhibit (e.g., what they express when they verbalize). The existence of such knowledge is well established, as the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge has been amply demonstrated (see, e.g., Reber 1989, Stadler and Frensch 1998, Sun et al 2005). Therefore it needs to be captured in some form in computational models. Computationally speaking, the involvement of the top level (in addition to the bottom level) may lead to “synergy” (Sun 2002): better performance under various circumstances due to the interaction of the two levels.