[ACT-R-users] Perception and Motor

[Mike Byrne]

On 2006.07.13, Chipman, Susan <CHIPMAS at ONR.NAVY.MIL> said:

> Since no one else has yet said so, I will tell you that the
> perceptual and motor components of ACT-R are pretty much
> borrowed from the work of David Kieras and David Meyer of the
> University of Michigan whose EPIC architecture emphasized these
> and demonstrated their importance to the cognitive community.  
> Apparently, however, it is still the case that the ACT-R
> implementation is not nearly a complete copy of what is in EPIC.

It is absolutely true that ACT-R borrowed numerous significant pieces
from EPIC, which itself was informed by the Card, Moran, and Newell
Model Human Processor.  Indeed, ACT-R's Motor and Speech modules are
almost directly reverse-engineered from EPIC's based on the detailed
description found in:

<ftp://www.eecs.umich.edu/people/kieras/EPICtutorial/EPICPrinOp.pdf>

However, the EPIC and ACT-R modules share no actual code.

On the issue of vision, I think some clarification is in order here.
Due to fundamentally different assumptions about how memory works,
the visual system in ACT-R is substantially different from the EPIC
visual system.  The ACT-R system is not an incomplete copy of the
EPIC system; they are different by necessity.  (A brief discussion of
this issue will appear in Wayne Gray's forthcoming book.)

The ACT-R auditory system is something of a hybrid of the EPIC system
and some of the structure of the ACT-R visual system.  

-Mike

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Mike Byrne, Ph.D.                           <byrne at acm.org>
Associate Professor, Psychology Department
Rice University, MS-25        <http://chil.rice.edu/byrne/>
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