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[Art Markman]

John R. Anderson to Receive the David E. Rumelhart Prize
  for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition

The Glushko-Samuelson Foundation and the Cognitive Science
Society are pleased to announce that John R. Anderson has been
chosen as the fourth recipient of the $100,000 David E. Rumelhart
Prize, awarded annually for outstanding contributions to the
formal analysis of human cognition. Anderson will receive this
prize and give the Prize Lecture at the 26th Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society in Chicago, August 4-8, 2004.

The David E. Rumelhart Prize

The David E. Rumelhart Prize was created by the Glushko-Samuelson
Foundation to honor David E. Rumelhart, a Cognitive Scientist who
exploited a wide range of formal methods to address issues and
topics in Cognitive Science. Perhaps best known for his
contributions to connectionist or neural network models,
Rumelhart also exploited symbolic models of human cognition,
formal linguistic methods, and the formal tools of
mathematics. Reflecting this diversity, the first three winners
of the David E. Rumelhart Prize are individuals whose work lies
within three of these four approaches.  Past recipients are
Geoffrey Hinton, a connectionist modeler, Richard M. Shiffrin, a
mathematical psychologist, and Aravind Joshi, a formal and
computational linguist.  Anderson is the leading proponent of the
symbolic modeling framework, thereby completing coverage of the
four approaches.

Research Biography of John R. Anderson

John R. Anderson, Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and
Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is an exemplary
recipient for a prize that is intended to honor "a significant
contemporary contribution to the formal analysis of human
cognition".  For the last three decades, Anderson has been
engaged in a vigorous research program with the goal of
developing a computational theory of mind.  Anderson's work is
framed within the symbol processing framework and has involved an
integrated program of experimental work, mathematical analyses,
computational modeling, and rigorous applications.  His research
has provided the field of cognitive psychology with comprehensive
and integrated theories.  Furthermore, it has had a real impact
on educational practice in the classroom and on student
achievement in learning mathematics.

Anderson's contributions have arisen across a career that
consists of five distinct phases.  Phase 1 began when he entered
graduate school at Stanford at a time when cognitive psychology
was incorporating computational techniques from artificial
intelligence.  During this period and immediately after his
graduation from Stanford, he developed a number of simulation
models of various aspects of human cognition such as free recall
[1].  His major contribution from this time was the HAM theory,
which he developed with Gordon Bower. In 1973, he and Bower
published the book Human Associative Memory [2], which
immediately attracted the attention of everyone then working in
the field.  The book played a major role in establishing
propositional semantic networks as the basis for representation
in memory and spreading activation through the links in such
networks as the basis for retrieval of information from memory.
It also provided an initial example of a research style that has
become increasingly used in cognitive science: to create a
comprehensive computer simulation capable of performing a range
of cognitive tasks and to test this model with a series of
experiments addressing the phenomena within that range.

Dissatisfied with the limited scope of his early theory, Anderson
undertook the work which has been the major focus of his career
to date, the development of the ACT theory [3]. ACT extended the
HAM theory by combining production systems with semantic nets and
the mechanism of spreading activation.  The second phase of
Anderson's career is associated with the initial development of
ACT.  The theory reached a significant level of maturity with the
publication in 1983 of The Architecture of Cognition [4], which
is the most cited of his research monographs (having received
almost 2000 citations in the ensuing years). At the time of
publication, The ACT* model described in this book was the most
integrated model of cognition that had then been produced and
tested. It has had a major impact on the theoretical development
of the field and on the movement toward comprehensive and unified
theories, incorporating separation of procedural and declarative
knowledge and a series of mechanisms for production rule learning
that became the focus of much subsequent research on the
acquisition of cognitive skills. In his own book on Unified
Theories of Cognition, Alan Newell had this to say: "ACT*, is in
my opinion, the first unified theory of cognition. It has pride
of place.... [It] provides a threshold of success which all other
candidates... must exceed".

Anderson then began a major program to test whether ACT* and its
skill acquisition mechanisms actually provided an integrated and
accurate account of learning.  He started to apply the theory to
development of intelligent tutoring systems; this defines the
third phase of his research.  This work grew from an initial
emphasis on teaching the programming language LISP to a broader
focus on high-school mathematics [5], responding to perceptions
of a national crisis in mathematics education.  These systems
have been shown to enable students to reach target achievement
levels in a third of the usual time and to improve student
performance by a letter grade in real classrooms.  Anderson
guided this research to the point where a full high school
curriculum was developed that was used in urban schools.
Subsequently, a separate corporation has been created to place
the tutor in hundreds of schools, influencing tens of thousands
of students.  The tutor curriculum was recently recognized by the
Department of Education as one of five "exemplary curricula"
nationwide.  While Anderson does not participate in that company,
he continues research developing better tools for tracking
individual student cognition, and this research continues to be
informed by the ACT theory. His tutoring systems have established
that it is possible to impact education with rigorous simulation
of human cognition.

In the late 1980s, Anderson began work on what was to define the
fourth phase of his research, which was an attempt to understand
how the basic mechanisms of a cognitive architecture were adapted
to the statistical structure of the environment.  Anderson (1990)
[6] called this a rational analysis of cognition and applied it
to the domains of human memory, categorization, causal inference,
and problem solving.  He utilized Bayesian statistics to derive
optimal solutions to the problems posed by the environment and
showed that human cognition approximated these solutions. Such
optimization analysis and use of Bayesian techniques have become
increasingly prevalent in Cognitive Science.

Subsequent to the rational analysis effort, Anderson has returned
his full attention back to the ACT theory, defining the fifth and
current phase of his career. With Christian Lebiere, he has
developed the ACT-R theory, which incorporates the insights from
his work on rational analysis [7].  Reflecting the developments
in computer technology and the techniques learned in the
applications of ACT*, the ACT-R system was made available for
general use. A growing and very active community of well over 100
researchers is now using it to model a wide range of issues in
human cognition, including dualtasking, memory, language,
scientific discovery, and game playing. It has become
increasingly used to model dynamic tasks like air-traffic
control, where it promises to have training implications
equivalent to the mathematics tutors. Through the independent
work of many researchers, the field of cognitive science is now
seeing a single unified system applied to an unrivaled range of
tasks.  Much of Anderson's own work on the ACT-R has been
involved relating the theory to data from functional brain
imaging [8].

In addition to his enormous volume of original work, Anderson has
found the time to produce and revise two textbooks, one on
cognitive psychology [9] and the other on learning and memory
[10]. The cognitive psychology textbook, now in its fifth
edition, helped define the course of study that is modern
introductory cognitive psychology. His more recent learning and
memory textbook, now in its second edition, is widely regarded as
reflecting the new synthesis that is occurring in that field
among animal learning, cognitive psychology, and cognitive
neuroscience.

Anderson has previously served as president of the Cognitive
Science Society and has received a number of awards in
recognition of his contributions. In 1978 he received the
American Psychological Association's Early Career Award; in 1981
he was elected to membership in the Society of Experimental
Psychologists; in 1994 he received APA's Distinguished Scientific
Contribution Award; and in 1999 he was elected to both the
National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and
Science. Currently, as a member of the National Academy, he is
working towards bringing more rigorous science standards to
educational research.

1. Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (1972). Recognition and
retrieval processes in free recall. Psychological Review, 79,
97-123.

2. Anderson, J. R. & Bower, G. H. (1973). Human associative
memory. Washington: Winston and Sons.

3. Anderson, J. R. (1976).  Language, memory, and thought.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

4. Anderson, J. R. (1983). The Architecture of
Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

5.  Anderson, J. R., Corbett, A. T., Koedinger, K., & Pelletier,
R.  (1995).  Cognitive tutors: Lessons learned.  The Journal of
Learning Sciences, 4, 167-207.

6. Anderson, J. R. (1990). The Adaptive Character of
Thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

7. Anderson, J. R. & Lebiere, C. (1998). The atomic components of
thought. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

8. Anderson, J. R., Qin, Y., Sohn, M-H., Stenger, V. A. & Carter,
C.  S. (2003.)  An information-processing model of the BOLD
response in symbol manipulation tasks. Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review. 10, 241-261.

9. Anderson, J. R. (2000). Cognitive Psychology and Its
Implications: Fifth Edition. New York: Worth Publishing.

10. Anderson, J. R. (2000). Learning and Memory, Second
Edition. New York: Wiley.