Modeling Human Spatial Memory Within a Symbolic Architecture of Cognition

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the integration of spatial cognition into a symbolic theory. The concepts of encoding object-locations in local allocentric reference systems and noisy representations of locations have been integrated into the ACT-R architecture of cognition. The intrinsic reference axis of the local reference systems automatically result from the sequence of attended locations. The first part of the paper describes experiments we performed to test hypotheses on the usage of local allocentric reference systems in the context of object-location memory in graphical layout structures. The second part describes in more detail the theory and its integration into ACT-R. Based on the theory a model has been developed for the task in the experiments. The parameters for the noise in the representation of locations and the parameters for the recall of symbolic memory chunks were set to values in the magnitude quoted in literature. The model satisfyingly reproduces the data from user studies with 30 subjects.