Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The notion that memory for goals is organized as a stack is central in cognitive theory in that stacks are core constructs leading cognitive architectures. However, the stack over-predicts the strength of goal memory and the precision of goal selection order, while under- predicting the maintenance cost of both. A better way to study memory for goals is to treat them like any other kind of memory element. This approach makes accurate and well-constrained predictions and reveals the nature of goal encoding and retrieval processes. The approach is demonstrated in an ACT-R model of human performance on a canonical goal-based task, the Tower of Hanoi. The model and other considerations suggest that cognitive architectures should enforce a two-element limit on the depth of the stack to deter its use for storing task goals while preserving its use for attention and learning.