ABSTRACT
Although much psychological theorizing has always been implicitly concerned with architectural issues—for that is what we are concerned with when we ask “what kind of a physical system is the mind?”—Allen Newell was arguably the first scientist to try to say something in detail about the nature of this architecture. In my reading of the history of the field this began with his 1973 paper on production systems as models of control structures (Newell, 1973a). It was here that the idea of proposing a new primitive architecture and discovering the constraints that it imposes on processes first took shape in what we then referred to as a theory-laden programming language. I have more to say about this as a research strategy later. But I begin by reviewing the concept of cognitive architecture and summarizing some things I have already written about why it is such a fundamental problem in cognitive science. In fact, in my view, it is the central problem of cognitive science and must be addressed from the start or the science will continue to develop fragmented and ad hoc models for small domains of data.
