Competing "retrieval" rule vs compiled "habit" rule?

[John Anderson]

non-trivial, but I think I can see the broad outline of two kinds of 
solution:

One is to relate it to declarative activation as you wish.  If so, 
then one could assume that there were more slots of the goal filled 
in the high-load condition and a lower probability of retrieving the 
key chunk "stop and buy bread" because of less associate activation. 
I do not understand why the probability of this would be unaffected 
by rehearsal of the chunk as you seem to imply.

The other solution is to relate working memory load to competition 
among procedures rather than declarative resource competition.  Then 
the model would go something like
1. Assume as you did that there is a "time is right and do it" production.
2. Assume as you do that it is competing with other productions.
3. Lets assume that it has lower priority than these other productions.
4. In the low load condition, just driving, there is only an 
occasional production firing and so lots of opportunity for the 
time-is-right production to insert itself.
5. In the high load condition, conversation and driving, there are 
the additional conversation productions that crowd out the 
time-is-right production.
A variant of this would to assume that only the conversation 
productions have priority over the time-is-right production.  I guess 
that the key concept here is the idea that in the low-load condition 
there is a lot of slack time when no production is firing.  This is 
very much a feature of 5.0 due to the thorough infusion of R/PM into 
the model.

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John R. Anderson
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: 412-268-2788
Fax:     412-268-2844
email: ja at cmu.edu
URL:  http://act.psy.cmu.edu/