[ACT-R-users] stopping pm

[Wolfgang Schoppek]

Acknowledging all the efforts of making ACT-R as veridical as 
possible, I think we should keep in mind that we don't simulate 
humans, but certain aspects of human cognitive processing. So 
discussing if a !stop! command would make ACT-R too artificial seems 
odd to me when I consider what high level of abstraction ACT-R models 
have (I'd even say, should have!). So what about motivation, emotion 
and the huge amount of experiential knowledge? I don't want to plead 
for a complete coverage of all these issues in ACT-R but rather to 
adjust the scale.
  So I think a !stop! command pertaining to (pm-run) would be more 
useful than harmful (btw: it would make debugging much easier).
  As for the !bang! syntax, I think we would reduce the sphere of 
possible ACT-R users (and uses) dramatically, when we eliminate it. 
Many models are explorative, (and sometimes a rough explorative model 
can be more informative than a model that was painfully tuned to one 
data set). In such models one needs the shortcuts permitted by !eval! 
and !bind!.
-- Wolfgang
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Dr. Wolfgang Schoppek          Universitaet Bayreuth
  Tel.: +49 921 554140
  http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/psychologie/wolfgang.html
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