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17
A multitasking general executive for compound continuous tasks
- Cognitive Science
, 2005
"... As cognitive architectures move to account for increasingly complex real-world tasks, one of the most pressing challenges involves understanding and modeling human multitasking. Although a number of existing models now perform multitasking in real-world scenarios, these models typically employ custo ..."
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Cited by 56 (17 self)
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As cognitive architectures move to account for increasingly complex real-world tasks, one of the most pressing challenges involves understanding and modeling human multitasking. Although a number of existing models now perform multitasking in real-world scenarios, these models typically employ customized executives that schedule tasks for the particular domain but do not generalize easily to other domains. This article outlines a general executive for the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) cognitive architecture that, given independent models of individual tasks, schedules and interleaves the models ’ behavior into integrated multitasking behavior. To demonstrate the power of the proposed approach, the article describes an application to the domain of driving, showing how the general executive can interleave component subtasks of the driving task (namely, control and monitoring) and interleave driving with in-vehicle secondary tasks (radio tuning and phone dialing). Keywords: Multitasking, Cognitive architectures, ACT–R, Driving 1.
Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action
- Psychological Review
, 2009
"... The authors assume that individuals adapt rationally to a utility function given constraints imposed by their cognitive architecture and the local task environment. This assumption underlies a new approach to modeling and understanding cognition—cognitively bounded rational analysis—that sharpens th ..."
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Cited by 39 (13 self)
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The authors assume that individuals adapt rationally to a utility function given constraints imposed by their cognitive architecture and the local task environment. This assumption underlies a new approach to modeling and understanding cognition—cognitively bounded rational analysis—that sharpens the predictive acuity of general, integrated theories of cognition and action. Such theories provide the necessary computational means to explain the flexible nature of human behavior but in doing so introduce extreme degrees of freedom in accounting for data. The new approach narrows the space of predicted behaviors through analysis of the payoff achieved by alternative strategies, rather than through fitting strategies and theoretical parameters to data. It extends and complements established approaches, including computational cognitive architectures, rational analysis, optimal motor control, bounded rationality, and signal detection theory. The authors illustrate the approach with a reanalysis of an existing account of psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task performance and the development and analysis of a new theory of ordered dual-task responses. These analyses yield several novel results, including a new understanding of the role of strategic variation in existing accounts of PRP and the first predictive, quantitative account showing how the details of ordered dual-task phenomena emerge from the rational control of a cognitive system subject to the combined constraints of internal variance, motor interference, and a response selection bottleneck.
Supporting efficient development of cognitive models at multiple skill levels: Exploring recent advances in constraintbased modelling
- In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, CHI'05
, 2005
"... This paper presents X-PRT, a new cognitive modeling tool supporting activities ranging from interface design to basic cognitive research. X-PRT provides a graphical model development environment for the CORE constraint-based cognitive modeling engine [7,13,21]. X-PRT comprises a novel feature set: ( ..."
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Cited by 19 (3 self)
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This paper presents X-PRT, a new cognitive modeling tool supporting activities ranging from interface design to basic cognitive research. X-PRT provides a graphical model development environment for the CORE constraint-based cognitive modeling engine [7,13,21]. X-PRT comprises a novel feature set: (a) it supports the automatic generation of predictive models at multiple skill levels from a single taskspecification, (b) it supports a comprehensive set of modeling activities, and (c) it supports compositional reuse of existing cognitive/perceptual/motor skills by transforming high-level, hierarchical task descriptions into detailed performance predictions. Task hierarchies play a central role in X-PRT, serving as the organizing construct for task knowledge, the locus for compositionality, and the cognitive structures over which the learning theory is predicated. Empirical evidence supports the role of task hierarchies in routine skill acquisition. Author Keywords user modeling, tools for usability evaluation.
Generating automated predictions of behavior strategically adapted to specific performance objectives
- Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI’06
, 2006
"... It has been well established in Cognitive Psychology that humans are able to strategically adapt performance, even highly skilled performance, to meet explicit task goals such as being accurate (rather than fast). This paper describes a new capability for generating multiple human performance predic ..."
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Cited by 11 (5 self)
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It has been well established in Cognitive Psychology that humans are able to strategically adapt performance, even highly skilled performance, to meet explicit task goals such as being accurate (rather than fast). This paper describes a new capability for generating multiple human performance predictions from a single task specification as a function of different performance objective functions. As a demonstration of this capability, the Cognitive Constraint Modeling approach was used to develop models for several tasks across two interfaces from the aviation domain. Performance objectives are explicitly declared as part of the model, and the CORE (Constraint-based Optimal Reasoning Engine) architecture itself formally derives the detailed strategies that are maximally adapted to these objectives. The models are analyzed for emergent strategic variation, comparing those optimized for task time with those optimized for working memory load. The approach has potential application in user interface and procedure design.
Knowing Where and When to Look in a Time-Critical Multimodal Dual Task
"... Human-computer systems intended for time-critical multitasking need to be designed with an understanding of how humans can coordinate and interleave perceptual, memory, and motor processes. This paper presents human performance data for a highly-practiced time-critical dual task. In the first of the ..."
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Cited by 11 (6 self)
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Human-computer systems intended for time-critical multitasking need to be designed with an understanding of how humans can coordinate and interleave perceptual, memory, and motor processes. This paper presents human performance data for a highly-practiced time-critical dual task. In the first of the two interleaved tasks, participants tracked a target with a joystick. In the second, participants keyed-in responses to objects moving across a radar display. Task manipulations include the peripheral visibility of the secondary display (visible or not) and the presence or absence of auditory cues to assist with the radar task. Eye movement analyses reveal extensive coordination and overlapping of human information processes and the extent to which task manipulations helped or hindered dual task performance. For example, auditory cues helped only a little when the secondary display was peripherally visible, but they helped a lot when it was not peripherally visible. Author Keywords Auditory displays, cognitive strategies, eye tracking, multimodal, multitasking, visual displays. ACM Classification Keywords
Identifying optimum performance trade-offs using a cognitively bounded rational analysis model of discretionary task interleaving
- Topics in Cognitive Science
"... We report the results of a dual-task study in which participants performed a tracking and typing task under various experimental conditions. An objective payoff function was used to provide explicit feedback on how participants should trade-off performance between the tasks. Results show that partic ..."
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Cited by 9 (6 self)
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We report the results of a dual-task study in which participants performed a tracking and typing task under various experimental conditions. An objective payoff function was used to provide explicit feedback on how participants should trade-off performance between the tasks. Results show that participants ’ dual-task interleaving strategy was sensitive to changes in the difficulty of the tracking task, and resulted in differences in overall task performance. To test the hypothesis that people select strategies that maximize payoff, a Cognitively Bounded Rational Analysis model was developed. This analysis evaluated a variety of dual-task interleaving strategies to identify the optimal strategy for maximizing payoff in each condition. The model predicts that the region of optimum performance is different between experimental conditions. The correspondence between human data and the prediction of the optimal strategy is found to be remarkably high across a number of performance measures. This suggests that participants were honing their behavior to maximize payoff. Limitations are discussed.
Informing Decisions: How people use online rating information to make choices
"... In this paper we investigate how people use online rating information to inform decision making. We examine whether a theory of searching for information to discriminate between alternative choices can explain behavior, and we contrast it to the normative theory. Partly in accord with the theory, fi ..."
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Cited by 1 (1 self)
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In this paper we investigate how people use online rating information to inform decision making. We examine whether a theory of searching for information to discriminate between alternative choices can explain behavior, and we contrast it to the normative theory. Partly in accord with the theory, findings from a controlled experiment suggest that in an environment dominated by positive reviews, such as the World-Wide Web, people gather more information for the best alternative under consideration, and they take more time to inspect reviews of lower rating. We discuss the theoretical and experimental implications, and propose a bounded optimal account of the way in which people acquire information in service of decision making. Author Keywords User modeling, information search, decision making, online
Corresponding Author’s Contact Information:
"... Accepted for publication in Human-Computer Interaction Alonso Vera is a Cognitive Scientist with an interest in human performance modeling ..."
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Accepted for publication in Human-Computer Interaction Alonso Vera is a Cognitive Scientist with an interest in human performance modeling
2 Psychology 3 Carnegie Mellon & NASA
"... It has been well established in Cognitive Psychology that humans are able to strategically adapt performance, even highly skilled performance, to meet explicit task goals such as being accurate (rather than fast). This paper describes a new capability for generating multiple human performance predic ..."
Abstract
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It has been well established in Cognitive Psychology that humans are able to strategically adapt performance, even highly skilled performance, to meet explicit task goals such as being accurate (rather than fast). This paper describes a new capability for generating multiple human performance predictions from a single task specification as a function of different performance objective functions. As a demonstration of this capability, the Cognitive Constraint Modeling approach was used to develop models for several tasks across two interfaces from the aviation domain. Performance objectives are explicitly declared as part of the model, and the CORE (Constraint-based Optimal Reasoning Engine) architecture itself formally derives the detailed strategies that are maximally adapted to these objectives. The models are analyzed for emergent strategic variation, comparing those optimized for task time with those optimized for working memory load. The approach has potential application in user interface and procedure design.
High-level Behavior Representation Languages Revisited
, 2006
"... There has only been a short history of high level languages to model human cognition based on cognitive architectures. TAQL is an early example (Yost, 1993). TAQL showed a large (3x) speed increase over plain Soar, ..."
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There has only been a short history of high level languages to model human cognition based on cognitive architectures. TAQL is an early example (Yost, 1993). TAQL showed a large (3x) speed increase over plain Soar,
