Developing Models for Multi-Talker Listening Tasks using the EPIC Architecture: Wrong Turns and Lessons Learned

This report describes the development of a series of computational cognitive architecture models for the multi-channel listening task studied in the fields of audition and human performance. The models can account for the phenomena in which humans can respond to a designated spoken message in the context of multiple simultaneous speech messages from multiple speakers - the so-called "cocktail party effect." They are the first models of a new class that combine psychoacoustic perceptual mechanisms with production-system cognitive processing to account for the end-to-end performance in an important empirical literature.Office of Naval Research, Cognitive Science Program, under grant numbers N00014-10-1-0152 and N00014-13-1-0358, and the U. S. Air Force 711 HW Chief Scientist Seedling programhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108165/1/Kieras_Wakefield_TR_EPIC_17_July_2014.pdf-1Description of Kieras_Wakefield_TR_EPIC_17_July_2014.pdf : Technical report conten

Diagrammatic displays for engineered systems: effects on human performance in interacting with malfunctioning systems

Computer graphics displays make it possible to display both the topological structure of a system in the form of a schematic diagram and information about its current state using color-coding and animation. Such displays should be especially valuable as user interfaces for decision support systems and expert systems for managing complex systems. This report describes three experiments on the cognitive aspects of such displays. Two experiments involved both fault diagnosis and system operation using a very simple artificial system; one involved a complex real system in a fault diagnosis task. The major factors of interest concerned the topological content of the display--principally, the extent to which the system structural relationships were visually explicit, and the availability and visual presentation of state information. Displays containing a topologically complete diagram presenting task-relevant state information at the corresponding point on the diagram appear to be superior to displays that violate these principles. A short set of guidelines for the design of such displays is listed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30028/1/0000396.pd

The acquisition of procedures from text: A production-system analysis of transfer of training

Learning a cognitive skill from written instructions can be viewed as consisting of converting the propositional content of the written material into a representation of procedural knowledge, such as production rules. In a transfer of training experiment, subjects learned from step-by-step instructions a series of related procedures, in different training orders, for operating a simple device. The strong between-procedure transfer effects were predicted by a simple model of transfer in which individual production rules can be transferred or re-used in the representation of a new procedure if they had been used in a previously learned procedure. Apparently, this transfer mechanism acts on declarative propositional representations of the production rules, suggesting that it is more similar to comprehension processes than to conventional practice mechanisms, or to Anderson's learning principles (1982, Psychological Review, 89, 369-406; 1983, The architecture of cognition, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press).Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26028/1/0000101.pd