how can ACT-R models age?

[Lynne]

The work that Marsha, Christian, Larry Daily and I have been doing on modeling
individual differences involves varying just W.  Although we have not tried
modeling aging differences, I've often thought about it and asked myself
whether W might not explain much of the differences between younger and older
people. I've thought that it would (adding the notion that poorer sensory
processes mean that more cognition has to be allocated to encoding as 
well).  Imagining that it will work and it really doing the job are 
different things, of course. So I'd be quite interested in hearing of 
your success or lack thereof of modeling these differences in 
performance by varying only W.

--Lynne

At 5:09 PM -0500 1/4/01, Dario Salvucci wrote:
>Might anyone know the current status of work relating ACT-R and 
>aging?  In particular, I'm wondering if anyone has done work toward 
>the following question: Given a "young expert" ACT-R model, is there 
>a general (domain-independent) way of making it an "elderly" model 
>simply by changing appropriate parameters?  For instance, one might 
>imagine that cycle time increases by some percentage causing general 
>slowdown (there seems to be EPIC work suggesting this), or that W 
>decreases, and/or that the latency of certain perceptual-motor 
>parameters increases.  I'm specifically interested in modeling 
>elderly drivers using an existing model of younger drivers, but I'm 
>hoping to carry over any related results / parameter changes from 
>other domains if at all possible.
>
>Thanks, and best wishes for the new year,
>Dario
>
>--------------------------------
>Dario Salvucci
>Cambridge Basic Research
>Email: dario at cbr.com
>Info: http://www.cbr.com/~dario

-- 

__________________________________________________________
Lynne M. Reder, Professor
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

phone:     (412)268-3792
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