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ACT-R/LISA

The goal of the ACT-R/LISA (Learning from instructions and Skill Acquisition) is to have a consistent system for learning from instructions and skill acquisition built on top of the ACT-R architecture. Most of the knowledge is represented as operators that are initially stored in ACT-R's declarative memory, and are interpreted by ACT-R production rules. The production compilation process gradually transforms these operators into compiled productions.

ACT-R/LISA is still in the early stages of development, but we already managed to model most of the ACT-R summer school tutorial projects and assigments in it. One practical goal of the project is that modeling in ACT-R/LISA should be easier than modeling in ACT-R itself!

As a first sample, here is a model of paired associates:

  (op read-probe :action (read probe))
  (op retrieve-key :pre probe :action (instance key)
              :fail feedback)
  (op key-answer :action (press key) :new-state feedback)
  (op read-feedback :state feedback :action (read key) :new-state done)
  (op done-paired :state done :action (repeat))

That's the whole model! Operators consist of several components, mainly the action and between zero and two preconditions. So operator read-probe specifies to read a probe from the screen. The second operator has an action, instance, that is one of the more powerful actions in Lisa. It tries to retrieve an instance from memory of a previous execution of the task (in this case a probe-key combination) in order to find a value for the key to press. Instance retrieval is often used a strategy in ACT-R, and here a single operator can take care of what normally requires several productions. The :fail directive specifies to go to the feedback stage if instance retrieval fails. The key-answer operator types in the retrieved key, read-feedback reads the feedback, and done-paired initiates the next trial.

This page and project is still under development, so stay tuned! ACT-R/LISA has been introduced during the ACT-R tutorial of ICCM-2007