CHREST (Chunk Hierarchy and REtrieval STructures) is a symbolic
cognitive architecture based on the concepts of limited attention, limited short-term memories, and
chunking. Learning, which is essential in the architecture, is modelled as the development of a network of nodes (chunks) which are connected in various ways. This can be contrasted with
Soar and
ACT-R, two other cognitive architectures, which use productions for representing knowledge. CHREST has often been used to model learning using large corpora of stimuli representative of the domain, such as chess games for the simulation of chess expertise or child-directed speech for the simulation of children’s development of language. In this respect, the simulations carried out with CHREST have a flavor closer to those carried out with
connectionist models than with traditional symbolic models.