Thursday, October 12, 2006

ACT-R Teaching Materials from the ACT-R site

Some of the best ACT-R Teaching materials are on the ACT-R site and for my students the most popular one was the one page overview of the theory with diagrams at url:
http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/

There are also 7 Tutorials about how the LISP ACT-R works (in html doc or pdf)
(with LISP code examples that run in ACT-R 6.0 environment)
# Unit1: Understanding Production Systems
# Unit2: Perception and Motor Actions in ACT-R
# Unit3: Attention
# Unit4: Base-level Learning and Accuracy
# Unit5: Activation and Context
# Unit6: production Utilities
# Unit7: Production Rule Learning

The best recent explanation of ACT-R theory by John Anderson that I have used in teaching is a complex article that introduced an extension of the theory with the imaginal buffer:
Anderson, J. R. (2005) Human symbol manipulation within an integrated cognitive architecture. Cognitive Science, 29(3), 313-341.
[info and link to pdf] at http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/publications/pubinfo.php?id=580

This article was difficult for my students to read but well received. To make it more likely that they would process all of it I made a text-to-speech version on MP3 files for them and got positive feedback that this addion audio version helped.

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