[ACT-R-users] Act-r time question

[Dan Bothell]

--On Thursday, November 04, 2004 12:43 PM -0500 "Emond, Bruno" 
<bruno.emond at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca> wrote:

> I am a little bit puzzled by the following act-r trace.
>
> The productions are fairly simple.
> ?Recall-Text-Location calls +retrieval>
> ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful tests that
>    =retrieval> isa error condition failure
>    the it changes the goal to find the visual location
>    of a text
> None of these productions do pm calls.
>
> The productions ?Find-Text-Location and ?Attend-To-Text
> call respectively +visual-location and +visual
>
> My question is what has appended to the time spent on
> ?Recall-Text-Location
> which shows when ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful fires?
>
> I am running act-r/pm 2.2
>
>  Time  0.000: Vision found LOC103
>  Time  0.000: ?Recall-Text-Location Selected
>  Time  0.050: ?Recall-Text-Location Fired
>  Time  2.050: ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful Selected
>  Time  0.100: ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful Fired
>  Time  0.100: ?Find-Text-Location Selected
>  Time  0.150: ?Find-Text-Location Fired
>  Time  0.150: Module :VISION running command FIND-LOCATION
>  Time  0.150: Vision found LOC104
>  Time  0.150: ?Attend-To-Text Selected
>  Time  0.200: ?Attend-To-Text Fired
>  Time  0.200: Module :MOTOR running command MOVE-CURSOR
>  Time  0.200: Module :VISION running command MOVE-ATTENTION
>  Time  0.285: Module :VISION running command ENCODING-COMPLETE
>  Time  0.285: Vision sees TEXT100
>  Time  0.285: ?Text-Found Selected
>  Time  0.335: ?Text-Found Fired
>  ...
>


Without seeing the model I can't really say, but it definitely looks
like there's either a bug in ACT-R or in your model.  If you send me
the full model I can take a look at it and give you more details and
fix the bug in ACT-R if that's what's wrong.

Ignoring the problem with the backward time jump and just looking
at this piece:

>  Time  0.000: Vision found LOC103
>  Time  0.000: ?Recall-Text-Location Selected
>  Time  0.050: ?Recall-Text-Location Fired
>  Time  2.050: ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful Selected

I want to comment on your concern about the "time spent on
?Recall-Text-Location".  Conceptually, there was only 50 ms
spent on ?Recall-Text-Location - from time 0 to time .05.  The
two seconds from .05 until 2.05 when ?Test-Recall-Not-Successful
was selected were spent "idle" in the procedural system.  Those
two seconds were time that the declarative system spent trying
to find a chunk as requested.  If there had been any productions
that matched the contents of the buffers after ?Recall-Text-Location
fired but before the declarative system signaled the failure
they could have fired in that intervening 2 seconds.

Dan