jACT-R : making cognitive modeling portable

August is nearly here, which means the two major cognitive modeling conferences are fast approaching. I will be attending both ICCM and CogSci this year, with a presentation at the later (on modeling embodied phenomenon). Feel free to track me down if you want to talk shop.

There will be a significant release arriving after the conferences. This will include many performance improvements, bug fixes, auditory and visual enhancements, etc. It will also include a streamlined installation (yay).

April's release is here. I've been doing a great deal of work on making it easier to swap out associative learning systems, so most of the fixes and features are related to that.

Core

The latest release includes two new major pieces of functionality.

There is a new update just posted. It includes some bug fixes and new features. Enjoy.

Features:

• BaseSensor now has immediate mode support which is better suited to less frequent, event based interfaces
• More logging across the board (internal)
• opened up api access to setting the perceptual module's symbol grounding code
• opened up api access to IVisualModule equations

Bug fixes:

Another release is out to coincide with two new tutorials (extensions & sensors). The new release just includes some new functionality and bundles that the tutorials use. Enjoy. This leaves one major tutorial left for developers : modules. Another tutorial is in the pipeline showing how to use the orthogonal parameter space search tool with iterative runs and the support for integrated analyses.

Developing for CommonReality: Extending BaseSensor

Developing for jACT-R : Extensions

Sometimes a model needs to interact with a device or system, but a full perceptual interface would be overkill. This is particularly true when the theoretical aspects of the model have nothing to do with embodied interaction. Sometimes you just need to model to have information dumped straight into its head. That's where extensions come in. They provide atheoretic additional functionality.

Thanksgiving isn't even here yet, much less the big winter holidays, but I've decided it's time for a present! The latest release brings some of the last few major fixes and features required for complete compatibility. Yes, 6.0 style associative links are finally here. The only things remaining are production compilation and a few small features on the PM side.

Enjoy.

One of the benefits of using the Eclipse platform for developing ACT-R models is that it supports a variety of tools for revision control and collaboration. Whether it is tracking down and reverting an errant change, sharing complete models, or collaboratively building them, Eclipse makes it quite simple. Here are a few pointers/best practices that you may want to consider.

Revision Control

Another day, another release. There were two big bugs recently uncovered dealing with capacity buffers and visual searches. Both have been resolved.

Capacity buffers have the ability to influence the priorities of instantiation selection. A buffer with more than one chunk can result in a single production having more than one instantiation. Unfortunately, since they will have the same utility, it's a crap shoot as to which should be chosen. This should be influenced by the ordering of the capacity buffer's ejection policy, but the procedural module was ignoring that. Fixed.