ACT-R is a model of the human cognitive process developed and used by cognitive psychologists, which can be applied to HCI. It is an acronym for "The Adaptive Control of Thought - Rational". While it is often referred to as "the ACT-R theory", it is not properly considered a theory of cognition, but rather a cognitive architecture that can accommodate different theories. The scope of ACT-R is greater than the scope of any particular theory, and multiple (possibly competing) theories can fit within the framework of ACT-R. It was developed to model problem solving, learning and memory.
J. Hale. NAACL '01: Second meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language technologies 2001, стр. 1--8. Morristown, NJ, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (2001)