[ACT-R-users] Question

[Dan Bothell]

--On Wednesday, June 25, 2008 6:36 PM -0500 Karri Peterson <karri.peterson at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I have been looking at the heart of ACT-R's implementation and as far as I can tell, information
> pulled into the goal, imaginal and other buffers which handle requests  returning chunks comes
> straight in from the declarative pool based on activation.  Does information come straight into
> these buffers basically based on activation or is there another structure or process  that
> requested information can be stored in or further processed by before a requested chunk hits a
> given buffer?
>
> Karri Peterson, MS, MS


I'm not quite sure I understand your question, but I'll attempt to
answer.  First, since you mention the imaginal buffer, I'm assuming
that you're interested in ACT-R 6, which is what I'll be describing.

The only buffer which returns chunks from the model's declarative memory
in response to a request is the retrieval buffer, which is the interface
to the declarative module.  All of the other modules which return chunks
in their buffers create those chunks based on the processing of the
particular module.  Those chunks will not be a part of the model's
declarative memory until they are cleared from the buffer.

The goal and imaginal modules build a new chunk based explicitly on the
details provided.  The perceptual modules (vision and audio) create the
chunks for their buffers (visual, visual-location, aural, and aural-
location) based on the features in the "world" which match the details of
the request (and sometimes even without a request).  The motor modules
(motor and speech) don't return any chunks in response to requests.

I hope that helps, and if you haven't done so, I would recommend working
through the assignments in the first few units of the tutorial, which
is included with the distribution, to get a feel for how the system
operates.

Dan