Good question. There's a LOT of material out there, and it could take a lifetime to parse through it all. So my own approach has been to skim a lot and latch onto whatever superficially seems interesting at first blush, do a deeper dive, and decide whether or not to keep digging. As it happens, one of the first things I latched onto was abductive inference, and an approach to automating same called "parsimonious covering theory". I've been working on my own implementation of PCT as a way to learn that.

I also think there are some interesting ideas in Minsky's The Society of Mind approach, so I've been going through some of his stuff. That and the old "Blackboard Architecture" model, which I see as having a tenuous sort of connection.

And while it's more "90's" than "80's", I've also been reading a lot of older literature on Multi-Agent Systems lately. There's been a lot of talk lately about "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" so I'm interested in that entire space.

Really, there's a thin, tenuous thread connecting most of my interests in this area (with the PCT stuff being sort of un-connected w/r/t the rest)... MAS's, Blackboard Architecture, Society of Mind, all deal with the idea of multiple "things" (call them modules, agents, components, whatever) working together in some fashion. I suspect there's "some there there" in terms of unifying all of these various AI approaches and achieving something useful. I could be wrong, but this is where I've been directing a lot of energy lately.

Russell & Norvig devote considerable space to it, and their chapters all end with a great historical review section.