The tutorial provides participants with an understanding of the details of Soar so that they can create simple Soar programs. This is a full-day tutorial, with an emphasis in the morning on understanding the syntax and structure of the architecture (the memories and processes), and an emphasis in the afternoon on agent development. In the morning, participants will learn to run, modify, and deb...

Humans use visual imagery for a variety of purposes including reasoning about visual properties and spatial relationships, anticipating future events, recalling past experiences, and memorizing concepts and facts. Cognitive architectures have traditionally ignored visual imagery, but we have started to explore this phenomenon in the context of Soar. Soar provides the underlying control, memory,...

We investigate a general cognitive model of group behaviors, based on Festinger’s social comparison theory (SCT), a prominent social psychology theory. We describe two possible implementations of SCT process at an architectural level, on the basis of the Soar cognitive architecture. The first, which seems to follow directly from Festinger’s social comparison theory, treats the SCT process as an...

Semantic memory stores a person's general knowledge about the world and plays an important functional role in generating intelligent behaviors. Semantic memory has been an active research field in psychology and is implemented in cognitive architectures such as ACT-R [1] to model various related phenomena in human. However, functionally-based cognitive architectures, such as Soar [2], have not ...

Chunks have long been proposed as a basic organizational unit for human memory. More recently chunks have been used to model human learning on simple perceptual-motor skills. In this paper we describe recent progress in extending chunking to be a general learning mechanism by implementing it within a general problem solver. Using the Soar problem-solving architecture, we take significant steps ...

We describe an improved version of a cognitive model that exhibits the expert to novice transition in solving physics problems. The initial model was written by Larkin and initially translated into Soar (version 4) by Levy. In revising it to run in the latest version of Soar (7.0.0), we have updated it to be an exemplar of an understandable and reusable cognitive model: it includes graphic disp...

This study quantifies the tradeoff associated with alternative physical representations of a social graph for processing interactive social networking actions. We conduct this evaluation using a graph data store named Neo4j deployed in a client-server (REST) architecture using the BG benchmark. In addition to the average response time of a design, we quantify its SoAR defined as the highest obs...

This paper describes our work on integrating distributed, concurrent control in a cognitive architecture, and using it to classify perceived behaviors. We are implementing the Robot Schemas (RS) language in Soar. RS is a CSP-type programming language for robotics that controls a hierarchy of concurrently executing schemas. The behavior of every RS schema is defined using port automata. This pro...