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Condition-action rules

By Steve Draper,   Department of Psychology,   University of Glasgow.

There is a general view on human learned behaviour which conceives it as entirely stored in the mind in terms, not of a fixed, rote, "automatic" sequence of individual actions, but in terms of a collection of condition-action rules e.g. "when you get to the curb, step down", or "when the kettle boils, fill the teapot with boiling water". (An older name for them was "production rules".)

There are two main sources for this view, roughly compatible:

A) The Artificial Intelligence branch, derived from Allen Newell

and eventually called "SOAR".

B) The cognitive psychology branch, derived from John R. Anderson

called "ACT*" (1983) and later "ACT-R" (2004).

To Do

Fix DOIs to APA publications
Add comment at the top on what cond-action rules can cover:
	capture errors, skill acq., some automatic generalisation, ...

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