Fall 2014: Meetings 1 and 2

The first meeting on Oct. 7 was dedicated to a broad discussion of cognitive architectures and ACT-R, with a focus on the first 2 chapters of:

• Anderson, John R. 2009. How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe?

In the second meeting (today, Oct. 14), Deniz led the discussion of chapter 3, which is the chapter dedicated to the declarative (memory) module. A lively discussion about the general research questions related to this that we can pursue as working researchers in (psycho)linguistics ensued. We touched upon the very close relationship between the declarative module and the procedural module and how it is non-trivial to divide the linguistic (more generally, higher cognitive) labor between them for any particular phenomenon of interest. We also started to discuss the ACT-R equations for memory activation and their relationship to Bayesian / rational approaches to cognition.

Next meeting, we will focus on an in-depth discussion of the ACT-R equations involving activation — see Table 3.2 on p. 110 in particular — and Karl will give us a hands-on introduction to Python ACT-R:

• https://github.com/tcstewar/ccmsuite
• https://sites.google.com/site/pythonactr/

Karen will then lead the discussion of chapter 4 of the Anderson (2009) book, which is dedicated to the procedural module.