ABSTRACT
Theories of higher-level cognition typically ignore lower-level processes such as visual attention and perception. They simply assume that lower-level processes deliver some relatively abstract description of the stimulus situation on which the higher-level processes operate. This certainly is an accurate characterization of our past work on the ACT–R theory (e.g., Anderson, 1993). The typical task that ACT–R has been applied to is one in which the subject must process some visual array. The array may contain a sentence to be recognized, a puzzle to be solved, or a computer program being written. We had always assumed that some processed representation of this visual array is placed into declarative memory in some highly encoded form, and we modeled processing given that representation.
