Entries tagged with cog

I've been thinking: how do people memorize long things? My proposal is that they use something like trinary trees.

(chunk-type node slot1 slot2 slot3)

(add-dm
  (c0 ISA node
     slot1 c1
     slot2 c2
     slot3 c3)

  (c1 ISA node
     slot1 Sun
     slot2 Mercury
     slot3 Venus)

  (c2 ISA node
     slot1 af31
     slot2 dda4
     slot3 0783)

  (c3 ISA node
     slot1 rats
     slot2 people
     slot3 elephants)
)

7+-2 is a rather well-accepted "information-theoretic" limit on short-term memory: this is how many "chunks" one can keep in there. This is not modeled explicitly in ACT-R: there is only one "declarative memory".

One effective strategy is to put more information in each chunk. But it is obvious that one can only do this so much. Niels has said that in ACT-R, chunks with more information heavier, and become this way harder to retrieve.

Meaningful chunks, of course, are easier to remember (see c1, c3). The relationship between the slots means that once one of them is found, retrieving the other 2 will be easy (through the associations). Also, since they have links to many concepts (that's what "meaningful" means), it's easier to retrieve them. And I'm not even talking about truth constraints yet (in case you're trying to remember a set of true sentences).

I tend to create procedures for routine tasks, and I tend to perform them very absent-mindedly. Maybe this is related to being impatient.

Since I've moved to Amsterdam, locking my bike is a good example. In the beginning, I was too lazy to lock both locks, but now it's second nature to me.

Anyway, this Friday I biked to the suburb of Diemen, which is farther East than any other place I've biked. I found a small garden next to a pond, and I sat down to try to meditate, just watch my breath for a few minutes.

Because I was right there, I didn't lock my bike. When I got the bike again to leave, I locked the bike and tried to move it... then I noticed something strange: the bike wouldn't move even though I thought I had just unlocked it. Then I unlock it again.

The point is that I treat the locking/unlocking process as a switch. When I want to get up and leave, my goal is no longer to "unlock the bike", but to "put the lock on the other setting". I could operate by having a goal of "get on bike" preconditioned by "make sure bike is unlocked", but then I would have to check which setting the lock was in. It's a smaller cognitive load for me to keep my "knowledge in the world" and employ this automated procedure, which works 95% of the time. I think it's not because the checking would cost me time and attention, but because remembering to check is a cognitive load.

Btw, I've forgotten the term used in ACT-R to describe the process by which two production rules collapse into one. This is related "proceduralization of declarative knowledge".

mental data structures

overautomation and cognitive modelling