Using a model of reaction time as the starting point

Another article from the ACT-R collection that provides a nice ACT-R introduction to reaction-time and sleep deprivation is:

Gunzelmann, G., Gluck, K. A., Van Dongen, H. P. A., O'Conner, R. M., & Dinges, D. F. (2005). A neurobehaviorally inspired ACT-R model of sleep deprivation: Decreased performance in psychomotor vigilance. In B. G. Bara, L. Barsalou, and M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, (pp. 857-862). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[info and link to pdf] http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/publications/pubinfo.php?id=596

For my teaching purposes this provides the bridge into the PythonACT-R models because the model in this article was translated into Python ACT-R by Terry Stewart with a little of my help.
http://brucelandon.douglas.bc.ca/2360w2007/demo/PVTdemo.py

The basic idea in building a theory is to start small and make it simple in the beginning.
Here the idea was to start with the simplest task - psychomotor vigilance task - "when the light goes on press the button as fast as you can" and work with simple reaction times as the data to model. It turns out that there is a very large literature in psychology about reaction time and its relation to many psychological variables: age, IQ, gender, personality, etc. Consequently the model of reaction-time and be a bridge from a simple PythonACT-R model with 3 productions to more complex models that explore intersting variables for students to think about.