Jen's ACT-R Project |
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Project CodeJen's ACT-R Home |
General DescriptionIn my ACT-R essay I argue that evaluating the current ACT-R model is difficult because the ACT-R code is not sufficiently accessible or explained. This makes evaluating both the basic ACT-R model and ACT-R models of specific tasks difficult.My project endeavours to make the working of the basic ACT-R model code more transparent. To do this, I have created a lisp library of functions that , when called, output into files the contents of ACT-R memory at a particular moment or moments during the run of the model. In some cases it may seem that these functions duplicate the functionality of macros that have already been supplied to modelers. There are important differences between the two, however. The functions in the ACT-R memory library print out the working memory of the basic ACT-R code. This is not necessarily equivalent to the interpreted values supplied by the macros. For a detailed explanation of the difference between these two, see my ACT-R essay. The output from these library functions can be used in various ways. The files may simply be viewed with a text editor. More usefully, they may be used along with unix functions to investigate changes in memory of relevance to the particular model being investigated. Finally, it may be used as data for other programs that can be used to illustrate various aspects of the models behaviour. Follow the ACT-R Memory Output Library link for an explanation of the ACT-R Memory Output Library and to download the code itself. Follow the ACT-R Perl Applications link for a discussion of how this output might be used and a sample perl application that compares global variable settings between different models and places the results in a table for easy comparison. |
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