Serial modules in parallel: The psychological refractory period and perfect time-sharing.

Byrne, Michael D.; Anderson, John R.

doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.847

Cited by 148 publications

(216 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…In the next part of the article, we introduce Schumacher et al's (1999) PRP tasks and then report a detailed analysis of the contributions of architecture and strategy to Byrne and Anderson's (2001) models of Schumacher et al's (1999) experiments. Our aim is to demonstrate how difficult it is to argue that architectures that permit strategic flexibility (such as EPIC and ACT-R) explain data based on evidence of a good fit, in the absence of a clear rational basis for the selected strategy.…”

Section: Parallel and Serial Cognitive Architecture Accounts Of Prp: mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Account of PRP Effects Byrne and Anderson (2001) reported detailed ACT-R models of Schumacher et al's (1999) E1-E4 that generated reaction time predictions for each combination of SOA, task, and Task 2 difficulty. For all four models, Byrne and Anderson estimated parameters based on single-task or long-SOA performance only and predicted short-SOA, dual-task RTs without further quantitative parameter estimation.…”

Section: An Analysis Of the Role Of Strategy In An Existingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When researchers use CBR analysis, models are calibrated on some aspect of the data, predictions are derived using the assumption of rational adaptation, and tests are made against the remaining data. Neither the model's architectural parameters nor its strategic parameters are adjusted to match the target data to be explained.The principle domain of illustration in this article concerns understanding the bounds on dual-task performance (and their individual variation) in psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments, an issue of considerable theoretical importance in the development of theories of cognitive control and attention, and a topic of much recent debate (Anderson, Taatgen, & Byrne, 2005;Byrne & Anderson, 2001;Hazeltine, Teague, & Ivry, 2002;Meyer & Kieras, 1997a, 1997bPashler, 1998). The rationale behind PRP experiments was simple: The systematic slowing of responses that emerges as two separate choice-reaction tasks are brought into close temporal proximity was believed to provide insight into fundamental, architectural properties of human multitasking-the ability to focus thought on more than one thing at a time (for extensive historical overviews, see Meyer & Kieras, 1997a;Pashler, 1998).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We then provide a concrete demonstration that current practice in applying theories of cognitive architecture does not take sufficient account of strategic variation. This demonstration takes the form of a detailed analysis of ACT-R (Anderson, 1993;Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) models of PRP reaction times (Byrne & Anderson, 2001) that shows that the attribution of explanatory credit to strategy or architecture is unclear for these models, and that therefore so is the resulting explanation of critical phenomena. We then describe our alternative modeling framework, CBR analysis.…”

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Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action.

Howes

Lewis

Vera

2009

Psychological Review

152

214

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The authors assume that individuals adapt rationally to a utility function given constraints imposed by their cognitive architecture and the local task environment. This assumption underlies a new approach to modeling and understanding cognition-cognitively bounded rational analysis-that sharpens the predictive acuity of general, integrated theories of cognition and action. Such theories provide the necessary computational means to explain the flexible nature of human behavior but in doing so introduce extreme degrees of freedom in accounting for data. The new approach narrows the space of predicted behaviors through analysis of the payoff achieved by alternative strategies, rather than through fitting strategies and theoretical parameters to data. It extends and complements established approaches, including computational cognitive architectures, rational analysis, optimal motor control, bounded rationality, and signal detection theory. The authors illustrate the approach with a reanalysis of an existing account of psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task performance and the development and analysis of a new theory of ordered dual-task responses. These analyses yield several novel results, including a new understanding of the role of strategic variation in existing accounts of PRP and the first predictive, quantitative account showing how the details of ordered dual-task phenomena emerge from the rational control of a cognitive system subject to the combined constraints of internal variance, motor interference, and a response selection bottleneck.Keywords: rational adaptation, bounded optimality, cognitive architecture, theory comparison, response ordering, dual taskThe extraordinarily flexible and adaptive nature of human behavior presents both unique opportunities and unique challenges for developing a science of the mind and brain. On the one hand, treating the mind as an adaptive system opens up possibilities for deep explanations of behavior that are grounded primarily in the observable structure and contingencies of the task environment, along with an assumption of rationality or optimal adaptation. This insight is the point of departure for a range of approaches to understanding cognition and perception, including rational analysis and related Bayesian approaches (Anderson, 1990;Berthier, Rosenstein, & Barto, 2005;Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes, & Cohen, 2006;Chater & Oaksford, 1999;Geisler, 2003;Tenenbaum, Griffiths, & Kemp, 2006), optimal motor control approaches (Maloney, Trommershäuser, & Landy, 2007;Meyer, Abrams, Kornblum, Wright, & Smith, 1988;Trommershäuser, Maloney, & Landy, 2003a, 2003bReichle & Laurent, 2006), as well as signal detection theory and ideal observer analysis (Green & Swets, 1966;Swets, Tanner, & Birdsall, 1961;Tanner & Swets, 1954). For example, in the arena of perception, ideal observer models demonstrate that human performance on some very simple discrimination tasks is limited only by external photon noise (Geisler, 2003). In the arena of memory, the decay over time of i...

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Section: Parallel and Serial Cognitive Architecture Accounts Of Prp: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Analysis Of the Role Of Strategy In An Existingmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action.

Howes

Lewis

Vera

2009

Psychological Review

152

214

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“…Here, RS operates over abstract symbols that are detached from modality and metrical influences. This model has been quite successful in accounting for behavior across a wide range of tasks, such as dual-task behavior (Anderson, Taatgen, & Byrne, 2005;Byrne & Anderson, 2001), categorization (Anderson & Betz, 2001), and general human performance (Anderson et al, 2004;Anderson, Qin, Sohn, Stenger, & Carter, 2003).…”

Section: Discrete Models Of Response Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaching into response selection: Stimulus and response similarity influence central operations.

Wifall¹,

Buss²,

Farmer³

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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iv ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the impact of stimulus and response similarity on response selection. Traditional models of response selection invoke a central processor that operates like a look-up table by matching the perceptually classified stimulus (e.g., green square) to the specified response (e.g., right button press). The look-up property of response selection affords the system the ability to map any stimulus onto any response, even if that stimulus-response has never been paired before. Under such an approach, the degree of perceptual similarity or dissimilarity that exists among stimuli in the environment should have little effect on central operations, the similarity or dissimilarity of the motor response executed in response to a stimulus should not influence response selection, and no interaction between stimulus and response features is permitted, given that stimulus features affect the encoding process, and response features affect the output process, but not response selection itself.Eight studies examine the influence of stimulus and response similarity during response selection. The first two experiments establish the interaction across different task demands between stimulus and response similarity. The interaction was not the result of perceptual difficulty (Experiment 3) and was extended to a new set of stimuli (Experiment 4). A consequence of the design in Experiments 1 -4 was that response condition was confounded with response configuration. In one of the response conditions the target location had three competitors on one side of it compared to the other condition where the target had one competitor on one side and two others on the other side.Experiments 5 and 6 examined the separate roles that response configuration and response metrics had on the interaction between stimulus and response similarity. The mechanism that produced the interaction was the result of competition between partially activated stimulus-response alternatives. Experiments 7 and 8 further explored the role of competition during response selection by turning to traditional response selection methodologies that introduce competition through either the presentation of irrelevant v stimulus information or through presenting the stimulus along an irrelevant spatial dimension.These data have broad implications for models of RS. To account for the ability to pair any stimulus modality with any response modality dominant accounts of RS assume that central operations are performed by a generic set of processes that operate over representations that are stripped of metric information (amodal representations).Response selection works as a look-up table that receives a categorized stimulus as an input and returns an abstract response code as output. This type of model cannot produce an interaction between stimulus and response similarity and thus, the present data provide a serious challenge to these types of models. Finally, the data provide evidence that the metric relationship between stimuli and response matter an...

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Procedural Memory and Skill Acquisition

Johnson

2012

Handbook of Psychology, Second Edition

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Serial modules in parallel: The psychological refractory period and perfect time-sharing.

Cited by 148 publications

References 27 publications

Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action.

Rational adaptation under task and processing constraints: Implications for testing theories of cognition and action.

Reaching into response selection: Stimulus and response similarity influence central operations.

Procedural Memory and Skill Acquisition

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