Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a connectionist implementation of the ACT-R production system. Declarative knov^ledge is stored as chunks in separate associative memories for each type. Procedural knowledge consists of the pattern of connections between the type memories and a central memory holding the current goal. ACT-R concepts such as adaptive learning and activation-based retrieval and matching naturally map into connectionist concepts. The implementation also provides a more precise interpretation for issues in ACT-R such as time of memory retrieval and production firing, retrieval errors and partial matching. Finally, the implementation suggests limitations on production rule structure