[ACT-R-users] BOLD tools

[Dan Bothell]

--On Thursday, June 26, 2008 9:03 AM +0200 Marco Ragni 
<ragni at cognition.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

> I'd like to know if there is a tutorial (or slides or anything like
> that) about the BOLD tools?
> Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out how to run these tools (newest
> stand alone version windows) for e.g. the paired associate model
> (Unit 4 & 7 of the tutorial). Can anyone give me a hint?
>

There's not much in the way of documentation on them because they
aren't really "general purpose" tools.  There's a file in the docs
directory called "bold-tools-readme.txt" which gives a very brief
description of each, but that's about it for the tools themselves.

They display the data returned by the predict-bold-response command.
You can find the documentation for that command in the bold module's
file which is other-files/bold.lisp.  There are papers available on
the ACT-R site under the fMRI research which describe the process
of how the BOLD response calculations are performed, but I'm not
sure which one would be the best reference.  Someone else should be
able to give you some specific references if needed.

The only thing necessary to make the tools work is that you need to
set the :save-buffer-trace parameter to t in the model so that the
data is recorded.  However, I don't think they'll be of much use for
the tutorial models because the experiments for those tasks aren't
really set up for producing BOLD response predictions - the trials
are generally short and there's no break between them.  Which doesn't
mean they won't work, just that I'm guessing the data won't be of much
use.  Adjusting some of the parameters for the bold module might help
(decreasing the time step and window for the computations in particular),
but even with that, my guess is that there's not much to see in those
tasks in their current form from a BOLD response perspective.

Hope that helps,
Dan