As someone who can maybe call themselves an ACT-R expert, I think the main thing I’d say about the intentional module being “not identified” is that we don’t have any fMRI data showing activity in any particular part of the brain being correlated to the use of the intentional module in various models. For all of the other parts that have brain areas identified, there’s pretty decent data showing that correlation with activity in particular brain areas. And also, for each of those other areas there’s pretty good arguments that those brain areas have something to do with tasks that involve those modules (brain damage studies, usually).
It’s worth noting that there’s no particular logical reason why there would have to be a direct correlation between modules in ACT-R and brain areas. ACT-R was developed based on looking at human behaviour and separating things out into behaviourally distinct components. There’s no particular reason that separating things out this way must map directly onto physically distinct components. (After all, the web browser and the word processor on a computer are behaviourally distinct, but not physically distinct). But it’s been really neat that in the last 20 years a surprising number of of these modules that have been around in various forms since the 70′s have turned out to map onto physically distinct brain areas.
The idea of the physical brain turning out to be similar to ACT-R after the code had been written based on high level timing data and so on… seems like strong support to me. Nice! Real science! Predicting stuff in advance by accident! <3
My memory from exploring this in the past is that I ran into some research with “math problem solving behavior” with human millisecond timing for answering various math questions that might use different methods… Googling now, this Tenison et al ACT-R arithmetic paper might be similar, or related?
With you being an expert, I was going to ask if you knew of any cool problems other than basic arithmetic that might have been explored like the Trolley Problem or behavioral economics or something…
(Then I realized that after I had formulated the idea in specific keywords I had Google and could just search, and… yup… Trolley Problem in ACT-R occurs in a 2019 Masters Thesis by Thomas Steven Highstead that also has… hahahaha, omg! There’s a couple pages here reviewing ACT-R work on Asimov’s Three Laws!?!)
Maybe a human level question is more like: “As an someone familiar with the field, what is the coolest thing you know of that ACT-R has been used for?” :-)
Yes, that Tenison paper is a great example of arithmetic modelling in ACT-R, and especially connecting it to the modern fMRI approach for validation! For an example of the other sorts of math modelling that’s more psychology-experiment-based, this paper gives some of the low-level detail about how such a model would work, and maps it onto human errors: - “Toward a Dynamic Model of Early Algebra Acquisition” https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.53.5754&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(that work was expanded on a few times, and led to things like “Instructional experiments with ACT-R “SimStudents”” http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/?post_type=publications&p=13890 where they made a bunch of simulated students and ran them through different teaching regimes)
The flashcard and curriculum experiments seem really awesome in terms of potential for applications. It feels like the beginnings of the kind of software technology that would exist in a science fiction novel where one of the characters goes into a “learning pod” built by a high tech race, and pops out a couple days layer knowing how to “fly their spaceship” or whatever. Generic yet plausible plot-hole-solving super powers! <3
As someone who can maybe call themselves an ACT-R expert, I think the main thing I’d say about the intentional module being “not identified” is that we don’t have any fMRI data showing activity in any particular part of the brain being correlated to the use of the intentional module in various models. For all of the other parts that have brain areas identified, there’s pretty decent data showing that correlation with activity in particular brain areas. And also, for each of those other areas there’s pretty good arguments that those brain areas have something to do with tasks that involve those modules (brain damage studies, usually).
It’s worth noting that there’s no particular logical reason why there would have to be a direct correlation between modules in ACT-R and brain areas. ACT-R was developed based on looking at human behaviour and separating things out into behaviourally distinct components. There’s no particular reason that separating things out this way must map directly onto physically distinct components. (After all, the web browser and the word processor on a computer are behaviourally distinct, but not physically distinct). But it’s been really neat that in the last 20 years a surprising number of of these modules that have been around in various forms since the 70′s have turned out to map onto physically distinct brain areas.
The idea of the physical brain turning out to be similar to ACT-R after the code had been written based on high level timing data and so on… seems like strong support to me. Nice! Real science! Predicting stuff in advance by accident! <3
My memory from exploring this in the past is that I ran into some research with “math problem solving behavior” with human millisecond timing for answering various math questions that might use different methods… Googling now, this Tenison et al ACT-R arithmetic paper might be similar, or related?
With you being an expert, I was going to ask if you knew of any cool problems other than basic arithmetic that might have been explored like the Trolley Problem or behavioral economics or something…
(Then I realized that after I had formulated the idea in specific keywords I had Google and could just search, and… yup… Trolley Problem in ACT-R occurs in a 2019 Masters Thesis by Thomas Steven Highstead that also has… hahahaha, omg! There’s a couple pages here reviewing ACT-R work on Asimov’s Three Laws!?!)
Maybe a human level question is more like: “As an someone familiar with the field, what is the coolest thing you know of that ACT-R has been used for?” :-)
Yes, that Tenison paper is a great example of arithmetic modelling in ACT-R, and especially connecting it to the modern fMRI approach for validation! For an example of the other sorts of math modelling that’s more psychology-experiment-based, this paper gives some of the low-level detail about how such a model would work, and maps it onto human errors:
- “Toward a Dynamic Model of Early Algebra Acquisition” https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.53.5754&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(that work was expanded on a few times, and led to things like “Instructional experiments with ACT-R “SimStudents”” http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/?post_type=publications&p=13890 where they made a bunch of simulated students and ran them through different teaching regimes)
As for other cool tasks, the stuff about playing some simple video games is pretty compelling to me, especially in as much as it talks about what sort of learning is necessary for the precise timing that develops. http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/paper46a.pdf Of course, this is not as good in terms of getting a high score as modern deep learning game-playing approaches, but it is very good in terms of matching human performance and learning trajectories. Another model I find rather cool a model of driving a car, which then got combined with a model of sleep deprivation to generate a model of sleep-deprived driving: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/9822011-gunzelmann_moore_salvucci_gluck.pdf
One other very cool application, I think is the “SlimStampen” flashcard learning tool developed out of Hedderik van Rijn’s lab at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands: http://rugsofteng.github.io/Team-5/ The basic idea is to optimize learning facts from flashcards by presenting a flashcard fact just before the ACT-R declarative memory model predicts that a person is going to forget a fact. This seems to improve learning considerably http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/867paper200.pdf and seems to be pretty reliable https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tops.12183
The flashcard and curriculum experiments seem really awesome in terms of potential for applications. It feels like the beginnings of the kind of software technology that would exist in a science fiction novel where one of the characters goes into a “learning pod” built by a high tech race, and pops out a couple days layer knowing how to “fly their spaceship” or whatever. Generic yet plausible plot-hole-solving super powers! <3