[ACT-R-users] ACT-R and Visual attention problem

[db30 at andrew.cmu.edu]

--On Wednesday, August 18, 2010 3:42 PM +0900 
"=?ks_c_5601-1987?B?udrDosf2?=" <y3rr0r at etri.re.kr> wrote:

>
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have met the ACT-R recently because of my project.
> A partial goal of the project is to find an attention region when an
> arbitrary picture(such as street, subway, school, etc) is presented to a
> monitor.
>
> My question is...
> 1) Can the act-r be inputted a picture?

No, there are no mechanisms built into ACT-R for processing arbitrary 
images.

ACT-R's interaction with the world occurs through what is called a device,
and it is the device which generates the features and objects which the
model can see.  The provided devices allow the model to see some simple
GUI elements (text, buttons, and lines) which are drawn using either the
GUI systems built into some Lisps or through a virtual GUI system built
into ACT-R.  The commands for using the virtual GUI are described in the
experiment description documents of the tutorial units.

If one wants other input or different features then it is possible to write
a new device for the system to provide the visual components to a model.
That new device is then responsible for parsing whatever external
representation of the world is desired and creating the chunks which the
vision module will use.  Documentation on creating a new device can be found
in the docs directory in the presentation titled "extending-actr.ppt".

I know that some researchers have attempted to build more general image
processing devices for ACT-R, but as far as I know none of those efforts
are currently available as working systems.

> 2) According to tutorial 2, act-r can find an attended location. What is
> the criterion for finding the attended location?
> 3) Can the act-r find an attended area in the inputted picture?
>

Sorry, I don't really understand what you're looking for with these
two questions.  I suspect that given the answer to the first one they
are not really relevant, but if that is not the case then please
feel free to elaborate on what you would like to know and ask again.

Hope that helps,
Dan