Exchanging Conflict Resolution in an Adaptable Implementation of ACT-R
This work addresses the problem of inflexibility in ACT-R implementations for researchers in computational cognitive science, though it is incremental as it builds on prior formalization work.
The authors tackled the lack of a formal, adaptable implementation of the ACT-R cognitive architecture by developing a concise implementation based on Constraint Handling Rules, enabling the implementation of several conflict resolution mechanisms, including the first implementation of one such mechanism, and empirically verifying that their approach matches reference implementations for others.
In computational cognitive science, the cognitive architecture ACT-R is very popular. It describes a model of cognition that is amenable to computer implementation, paving the way for computational psychology. Its underlying psychological theory has been investigated in many psychological experiments, but ACT-R lacks a formal definition of its underlying concepts from a mathematical-computational point of view. Although the canonical implementation of ACT-R is now modularized, this production rule system is still hard to adapt and extend in central components like the conflict resolution mechanism (which decides which of the applicable rules to apply next). In this work, we present a concise implementation of ACT-R based on Constraint Handling Rules which has been derived from a formalization in prior work. To show the adaptability of our approach, we implement several different conflict resolution mechanisms discussed in the ACT-R literature. This results in the first implementation of one such mechanism. For the other mechanisms, we empirically evaluate if our implementation matches the results of reference implementations of ACT-R.