[ACT-R-users] Dancy's successfully defended ACT-R/Phi PhD dissertation today

[Frank Ritter]

just a quick note, if you have been following Chris Dancy's work on 
tying ACT-R to a physiology architecture to create ACT-R/Phi, he just 
successfully defended his dissertation today.

code, models, papers, available from him.  abstract and title below.

cheers,

Frank


WHY THE CHANGE OF HEART? UNDERSTANDING THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN 
PHYSIOLOGY, AFFECT, AND COGNITION AND THEIR EFFECTS ON DECISION- 
MAKING

A Dissertation in Information Sciences and Technology by Christopher 
L. Dancy II

How do physiological and affective processes interact with cognitive 
processes to change the way we think? How can we better understand 
the processes that underlie decision-making and choice behavior? This 
dissertation presents a novel hybrid cognitive architecture, ACT-R/?, 
which extends the ACT-R cognitive architecture with an integrative 
model of physiology and a model of affect and emotion. Extending a 
cognitive architecture with representations of affect and physiology 
allows the straightforward development of more illustrative 
computational process models of human behavior that represent 
experimental results from physiology, neuroscience, and psychology. 
Computational models were developed that provide an account of how 
physiological change due to psychological stress or homeostasis can 
modulate cognitive processes. An experiment was run to explore how 
subliminal visual emotional stimuli affect physiology and 
decision-making behavior during the Iowa Gambling Task. Results 
indicate that effects of subliminal affective stimuli were dependent 
on participant sex and personality differences. A computational 
process model was developed that performs the same task and behaves 
similarly to the participants.

Physiological and affective states continually interact with 
cognitive processes, biasing memory and consequently decisions. 
Evolved adaptations that support physiological and affective change 
of behavior (e.g., natural reactions to thirst or hunger) affect the 
way we learn and make choices. The ACT-R/? hybrid architecture, and 
the theoretical architectural model it is built upon, can be used to 
develop models of human behavior that include the necessary accounts 
of physiology and affect that describe what the body needs and how 
changes in behavior affects these needs. This improved understanding 
of the architecture that constrains our behavior gives us a better 
opportunity to comprehend why we make the decisions we do and how we 
can use this knowledge to make better decisions.