Cognitive Constraint Modeling: A Formal Approach to Reasoning About Behavior
Howes, A., Vera, A., Lewis, R.L. McCurdy, M. (2004). Cognitive Constraint Modeling: A formal approach to supporting reasoning about behavior. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago.
Cognitive Constraint Modeling (CCM) is an approach to reasoning about behavior that (1) provides a framework for investigating the hypothesis that skilled behavior is the optimal solution to a constraint satisfaction problem defined by objective, environmental, knowledge, and architectural constraints, (2) derives predictions of behavior from formal specifications of theory, (3) supports reasoning using both dependency-based and cascade-based ontologies for expressing temporal relationships between processes. A software tool that demonstrates the potential advantages of CCM is described. The tool, called CORE, can be used to partially automate the generation of behavioral predictions given a specification of the constraints. We explore the application of CORE to dual-task data previously modeled with EPIC and ACT-R.
