ABSTRACT
Incremental performance improvement with accumulated experience has been measured in human beings for a wide variety of cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks (Newell, 1987). “Chunking” produces similar performance improvements in symbolic computer programs, such as the SOAR production system (Laird et al., 1987). Chunking takes place in SOAR by observing the working memory trace associated with a sequence of rule firings, and abstracting from this trace a chunk which in the future will produce the same results in a single step.
