Rabinowitz and Goldberg Alphabet Arithmetic Experiment

[Todd R. Johnson]

Has anyone written an Act-R model of the Alphabet arithmetic experiments in
the following paper?

	Rabinowitz, M., & Goldberg, N. (1995). Evaluating the structure-process
hypothesis. In F. E. Weinert & W. Schneider (Eds.), Memory Performance and
Competencies: Issues in Growth and Development (pp. 225-242). Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

I am going to give a talk on "Memory and Learning in Act-R and Soar" at the
upcoming Soar workshop. The talk will focus on Act-R and Soar models of the
experiments in this paper. 

If you are interested, and not familiar with this paper, it shows that
people use computation (procedural knowledge) to acquire declarative
knowledge that allows them to switch from computation to retrieval. It also
shows that procedural knowledge and declarative retrieval speed up with
practice and that procedural knowledge is subject to asymmetric access,
whereas declarative knowledge is subject to symmetric access. It is
somewhat similar to the Zbrodoff alphabet artihmetic experiment, for those
of you familiar with the Act-R tutorial. Both experiments are summarized in
John and Christian's draft chapters of the Act 4 book.

The Rabinowitz and Goldberg experiment is interesting from a comparative
architectures perspective, because the results appear to be completely
consistent with Act-R, but largely inconsistent with Soar. 


      ---Todd

Todd R. Johnson			(http://www.medinfo.ohio-state.edu/tj)
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Pathology
Division of Medical Informatics
The Ohio State University