ACT-R - A THEORY OF HIGHER-LEVEL COGNITION AND ITS RELATION TO VISUAL-ATTENTION

The ACT-R system is a general system for modeling a wide range of high er level cognitive processes. Recently, it has been embellished with a theory of how its higher level processes interact with a visual inter face. This includes a theory of how visual attention can move acre ss the screen, encoding information into a form that can be processed by ACT-R. This system is applied to modeling several classic phenomena in the literature that depend on the speed and selectivity with which vi sual attention can move across a visual display. ACT-R is capable of i nteracting with the same computer screens that subjects do and, as suc h, is well suited to provide a model for tasks involving human-compute r interaction. In this article, we discuss a demonstration of ACT-R's application to menu selection and show that the ACT-R theory makes uni que predictions, without estimating any parameters, about the time to search a menu. These predictions are confirmed.