[ACT-R-users] Novice help on ACT-R's functionality

[Vinay Chilukuri]

Hello all,
I have recently discovered ACT-R. I have been reading about this
wonderful tool and trying out some basic models on my own.
I understand that ACT-R is a theory in cognition and also that it can
be used to model behavioral experiments.

My question is:
1) Given some knowledge in the declarative memory, can I retrieve the
information when queried upon?
If yes, how can I query it?

Specifically,
my experiment consisted of assessing recall of a movie-stimulus and
the questions that were posed to the participants were Open-Ended.
Eg: "Describe what happened in Jack's apartment?"; "Why did Jack had
to stop on his way to the restaurant?"
I intend to describe the events of the movie as chunks. Each event
would be characterized by a set of attributes/slots.

Though I think it is quite a challenge to query the model in the same
way as was done with the experiment, I would like to know how an ACT-R
model can be queried.

2) Also, is there a way of adding chunks to the model's declarative
memory at a specific time duration?

Please excuse the novice questions!
Looking forward to learn more about this interesting architecture.

Thank you for your time.
-- 
Vinay Chilukuri
Research Student,
Cognitive Science Lab,
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.