ACT-R Software

ACT-R the theory is embodied in ACT-R the software, as a set of functions and algorithms implemented in Common Lisp. Since the ACT-R implementation lives in Lisp, the aspiring cognitive modeler must also have access to some Lisp environment, or use the standalone version of the ACT-R Environment.

This page holds information about the current version of the software, ACT-R 6. For information about older versions of the software, you need to check out the older software page.

ACT-R 6.0

version 1.4 [r1307] updated December 20, 2012

Source Code

The source code zip file contains all the Lisp source code as well as the tutorial, reference manuals, and the ACT-R Environment GUI.

See the QuickStart.txt file for startup instructions (that file is also included in the docs directory of the distribution).

Standalone Versions

The standalone version of the software runs ACT-R 6 without the need to have a separate Lisp application installed.

There are standalone versions of ACT-R 6 for Windows and Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.

Installation and running instructions can be found in the included Readme files because they differ by version.

Support

If you have any problems or questions about the ACT-R software please contact Dan.

Tutorial Units and Teaching Materials

The unit texts can be downloaded separately, but are already included in the software distributions above.

Here are the slides from the unit lectures of the 2012 and 2010 ACT-R Summer Schools.

A set of slides for use with the tutorial written by Bill Kennedy are available here.

Reference Manuals

The manuals for the ACT-R 6 software are included in the docs directory of the software distributions and also available here:

ACT-R 6 Reference Manual

ACT-R 6 Environment Manual

ACT-R 6 GUI experiment creation commands

Other Material

The logs of the commits to the Subversion source code archive of ACT-R 6 are available via LiveJournal, a text log or an atom feed.

Slides on the updates between the Summer 2008 release and Winter 2008 release.

Design notes on the production compilation mechanism.

Slides from the ACT-R Tutorials at ICCM 2007.

Slides from the 2005 ACT-R Workshop official release of ACT-R 6.

Slides from an ACT-R research group meeting on April 8th, 2005.

Slides of a talk by Dan on proposed changes presented after ICCM 2004.

Draft of the API for part of the ACT-R 6 code.

Here is the original document on the proposals for ACT-R 6 as a pdf file

Here is the presentation that was given in the "Future of ACT-R session" at the 2003 ACT-R Workshop in PowerPoint