[ACT-R-users] Some elementar doubts...

[Anthony Hornof]

Finding the "right" set of production rules is one of the challenges of 
cognitive modeling with any production rule system.  One general 
approach is to make your rules as parsimonious as possible and yet 
still keep them psychologically plausible.  Cognitive architectures 
such as ACT-R also generally have modeling policies that influence how 
you should write your production rules, which influence how they will 
perform.  An ACT-R policy, for example, is that you only put one thing 
at a time in the goal buffer, and that you don't use it as a goal 
stack.  (This may be enforced by the architecture now.  If not, it's a 
policy.  Anyone, please correct me if I got any of that wrong.)

Much of learning how to use an architecture consists of learning these 
policies.  They are usually somewhat distributed among tutorials, 
documentation, and previous articles that have been written.

Another general approach to writing "accurate" production rules is to 
write two sets of production rules that "bracket" the observed data, 
where one end of the bracket is a slowest-reasonable strategy, the 
other end is the fastest-plausible, and the observed data fall in 
between, ideally even for individual participants.  The challenge then 
is to use the interesting features in the data to figure out which 
aspects of the two strategies were used by the participants, perhaps 
even on a participant-by-participant basis.  Bracketing is discussed in:

Gray, W. D., & Boehm-Davis, D. A. (2000). Milliseconds matter: An 
introduction to microstrategies and to their use in describing and 
predicting interactive behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: 
Applied, 6(4), 322-335.

Kieras, D. E., & Meyer, D. E. (2000). The role of cognitive task 
analysis in the application of predictive models of human performance. 
In J. M. C. Schraagen, S. E. Chipman, & V. L. Shalin (Eds.), Cognitive 
task analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Anthony Hornof
--------------
University of Oregon
Department of Computer and Information Science
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~hornof/



On Monday, February 2, 2004, at 08:24  PM, Estevão Bittar wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I`m starting my ACT-R studies and so I have been disturbed with a few 
> elementar doubts. While modeling simple experiments in ACT-R 
> Environment, I realized that is possible to execute the same task 
> using diferents sets of productions and chunks. Each one of this sets 
> will take different times to be executed. How I`ll know the time that 
> will better fit a posterior research data?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Estêvão Bittar - Uberlândia/Brazil
>
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