ABSTRACT
Soar is a theory of the human cognitive architecture. We present here the Soar theory of taking instructions for immediate reasoning tasks, which involve extracting implicit information from simple situations in a few tens of seconds. This theory is realized in a computer system that comprehends simple English instructions and organizes itself to perform a required task. Comprehending instructions produces a model of future behavior that is interpretively executed to yield task behavior. Soar thereby acquires task-specific problem spaces that, together with basic reasoning capabilities, model human performance in multiple immediate reasoning tasks. By providing an account of taking instructions, we reduce the degrees of freedom available to our theory of immediate reasoning, and also give more support for Soar as a unified theory of cognition.
