Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

in thinking about cognition without bringing in perceptual and motor processes”
(Newell, 1990, p. 15). This was also true of the next generation of production systems,
the adaptive control of thought (ACT) architecture (Anderson, 1983). ACT
“historically was focused on higher level cognition and not perception or action”
(Anderson et al., 2004, p. 1038).
More modern production systems, such as EPIC (executive-process interactive
control) (Meyer & Kieras, 1997a, 1997b), have evolved to include sensing and acting.
EPIC simulates the performance of multiple tasks and can produce the psychological
refractory period (PRP). When two tasks can be performed at the same time, the
stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the tasks is the length of time from the
start of the first task to the start of the second task. When SOAs are long, the time
taken by a subject to make a response is roughly the same for both tasks. However, for
SOAs of half a second or less, it takes a longer time to perform the second task than
it does to perform the first. This increase in response time for short SOAs is the PRP.
EPIC is an advanced production system. One of its key properties is that productions
in EPIC can act in parallel. That is, at any time cycle in EPIC processing,
all productions that have matched their conditions in working memory will
act to alter working memory. This is important; when multiple tasks are modelled
there will be two different sets of productions in action, one for each task. EPIC also
includes sensory processors (such as virtual eyes) and motor processors, because
actions can constrain task performance. For example, EPIC uses a single motor processor
to control two “virtual hands.” This results in interference between two tasks
that involve making responses with different hands.
While EPIC (Meyer & Kieras, 1997a, 1997b) explicitly incorporates sensing,
acting, and thinking, it does so in a fashion that still exemplifies the classical sandwich.
In EPIC, sensing transduces properties of the external world into symbols
to be added to working memory. Working memory provides symbolic expressions
that guide the actions of motor processors. Thus working memory centralizes the
“thinking” that maps sensations onto actions. There are no direct connections
between sensing and acting that bypass working memory. EPIC is an example of
sense-think-act processing.
Radical embodied cognitive science, which is discussed in Chapter 5, argues
that intelligence is the result of situated action; it claims that sense-think-act processing
can be replaced by sense-act cycles, and that the rule-governed manipulation
of expressions is unnecessary (Chemero, 2009). In contrast, classical researchers
claim that production systems that include sensing and acting are sufficient to
explain human intelligence and action, and that embodied theories are not necessary
(Vera & Simon, 1993).
It follows that there is no need, contrary to what followers of SA [situated action]
seem sometimes to claim, for cognitive psychology to adopt a whole new language
92 Chapter 3