Editing ACT-R (section)

===Brief outline===
ACT-R's most important assumption is that human knowledge can be divided into two irreducible kinds of representations: ''[[Declarative memory|declarative]]'' and ''[[Procedural memory|procedural]]''. 
 
Within the ACT-R code, declarative knowledge is represented in the form of ''chunks'', i.e. vector representations of individual properties, each of them accessible from a labelled slot.

Chunks are held and made accessible through ''buffers'', which are the front-end of what are ''modules'', i.e. specialized and largely independent brain structures.

There are two types of modules:

* '''Perceptual-motor modules''', which take care of the interface with the real world (i.e., with a simulation of the real world). The most well-developed perceptual-motor modules in ACT-R are the visual and the manual modules.
* '''Memory modules'''. There are two kinds of memory modules in ACT-R:
** '''Declarative memory''', consisting of facts such as ''Washington, D.C. is the capital of United States'', ''France is a country in Europe'', or ''2+3=5''
** '''Procedural memory''', made of productions. Productions represent knowledge about how we do things: for instance, knowledge about how to type the letter "Q" on a keyboard, about how to drive, or about how to perform addition.

All the modules can only be accessed through their buffers. The contents of the buffers at a given moment in time represent the state of ACT-R at that moment. The only exception to this rule is the procedural module, which stores and applies procedural knowledge. It does not have an accessible buffer and is actually used to access other modules' contents.

Procedural knowledge is represented in form of ''productions''.  The term "production" reflects the actual implementation of ACT-R as a [[production system (computer science)|production system]], but, in fact, a production is mainly a formal notation to specify the information flow from cortical areas (i.e. the buffers) to the basal ganglia, and back to the cortex.

At each moment, an internal pattern matcher searches for a production that matches the current state of the buffers. Only one such production can be executed at a given moment. That production, when executed, can modify the buffers and thus change the state of the system. Thus, in ACT-R, cognition 
unfolds as a succession of production firings.