[ACT-R-users] New publications

[Wayne Gray]

I am pleased to bring Wai-Tat's newest publication to the attention  
of the ACT-R community.

This is now available, on-line, from Science Direct, Elsevier, and  
all of the other usual sources.

Wayne

Fu, W.-T., & Gray, W. D. (2006). Suboptimal tradeoffs in information  
seeking. Cognitive Psychology, 52(3), 195-242.

Explicit information-seeking actions are needed to evaluate  
alternative actions in problem-solving tasks. Information-seeking  
costs are often traded off against the utility of information. We  
present three experiments that show how subjects adapt to the cost  
and information structures of environments in a map-navigation task.  
We found that subjects often stabilize at suboptimal levels of  
performance. A Bayesian satisficing model (BSM) is proposed and  
implemented in the ACT-R architecture to predict information-seeking  
behavior. The BSM uses a local decision rule and a global Bayesian  
learning mechanism to decide when to stop seeking information. The  
model matched the human data well, suggesting that adaptation to cost  
and information structures can be achieved by a simple local decision  
rule. The local decision rule, however, often limits exploration of  
the environment and leads to suboptimal performance. We propose that  
suboptimal performance is an emergent property of the dynamic  
interactions between cognition and the environment.

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