[ACT-R-users] CAPI

[Dan Bothell]

--On Monday, February 25, 2008 9:10 PM -0600 He Jibo <hejibo at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> Hi,
>    I hope to create a GUI of an ATM, and a cognitive model for ATM
> transaction. My friend told me that CAPI may help for my task. Could
> anyone give me more information about it? If there is a tutorial of CAPI,
> that would be great!
>    Or if I use other GUI creating tool, such as wxPython, how can I link
> these GUI with ACT-R?
>
>    Thanks! Have a good night! :-)
>
> Jibo
>

I would suggest working through the ACT-R tutorial and reading the
auxiliary texts which accompany the units.  There is a simple set of
GUI construction tools built into ACT-R which allow one to create
basic interfaces with which a model can interact and they are described
in those auxiliary unit texts.  Those tools work with ACL, MCL and
LispWorks as well as through the ACT-R environment in other Lisps which
don't have a native GUI.  It only provides some basic elements, text,
buttons and lines, by default, but it can be extended or replaced with
your own interface to some other system if you need to do so.  One
advantage of the built in ACT-R tools is that the model can also
interact with them in a virtual fashion i.e. the same interface without
a real window, which will usually run much faster if you are looking to
collect data from many simulated experimental runs.

If you would like to create your own interface for ACT-R what you will
need to do is create what is called a "device" for the model to interact
with.  There is a set of slides in the docs directory of ACT-R 6 called
"extending-actr.ppt" which covers the basics of what one needs to do
to create a device.

Hope that helps, and if you have any specific questions on the tools
please feel free to ask.

Dan