The Adaptive Character of Thought

291 Pages·1990·5.03 MB·English

by  John R. Anderson

The Adaptive Character
of Thought
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STUDIES IN COGNITION
A series of volumes edited by
Edward E. Smith, Allan Collins, and Kurt VanLehn
Anderson: The Adaptive Character of Thought
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The Adaptive Character
of Thought
John R. Anderson
Carnegie Mellon University
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
1990 Hillsdale, New Jersey Hove and London
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Copyright © 1990 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
365 Broadway
Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, John R. (John Robert), 1947-
The adaptive character of thought / John R. Anderson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8058-0419-6
1. Cognition 2. Adaptation (Psychology) 3. Cognitive
psychology—Research —Methodology. I. Title.
BF311.A585 1990
153-dc20 90-35099
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 43
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To Abe, Jay, and Lynne
with love
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Contents
Preface ix
1. INTRODUCTION 1
Preliminaries 1
Levels of a Cognitive Theory 3
Current Formulation of the Levels Issue 17
The New Theoretical Framework 23
Is Human Cognition Rational? 31
The Rest of This Book 38
Appendix: Non-Identifiability and Response Time 38
2. MEMORY 41
Preliminaries 41
A Rational Analysis of Human Memory 43
The History Factor 49
The Contextual Factor 61
Relationship of Need and Probability to Probability and
Latency of Recall 72
Combining Information From Cues 77
Implementation in the ACT Framework 82
Effects of Subject Strategy 84
Conclusions 89
3. CATEGORIZATION 93
Preliminaries 93
The Goal of Categorization 95
The Structure of the Environment 96
Recapitulation of Goals and Environment 100
The Optimal Solution 101
An Iterative Algorithm for Categorization 102
Application of the Algorithm 106
Survey of the Experimental Literature 111
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Viii CONTENTS
Conclusion 132
Appendix: The Ideal Algorithm 138
4. CAUSAL INFERENCE 149
Preliminaries 149
Basic Formulation of the Causal Inference Problem 151
Causal Estimation 155
Cues for Causal Inference 161
Integration of Statistical and Temporal Cues 168
Discrimination 172
Abstraction of Causal Laws 177
Implementation in a Production System 186
Conclusion 187
Appendix 187
5. PROBLEM SOLVING 191
Preliminaries 191
Making a Choice Among Simple Actions 194
Combining Steps 201
Studies of Hill Climbing 215
Means-Ends Analysis 221
Instantiation of Indefinite Objects 228
Conclusions on Rational Analysis of Problem Solving 229
Implementation in ACT 230
Appendix: Problem Solving and Clotheslines 232
6. RETROSPECTIVE 244
Preliminaries 244
Twelve Questions About Rational Analysis 246
REFERENCES 259
AUTHOR INDEX 271
SUBJECT INDEX 275
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Preface
The history behind this book illustrates the fact that science is an adventure
and not a planned activity. When I finished my last major research
monograph on the ACT* theory (Anderson, 1983), I set out to apply the
theory to the acquisition of complex skills. As I described it in 1983, the
goal of this endeavor was to "permanently break the theory." Much, but not
all of this research involved the creation of intelligent tutoring systems and
the study of students’ behavior with these systems. Surely, I reasoned to
myself, I would see the theory crumble as I tried to teach mathematics or
programming based on the theory’s analysis of skill acquisition. Well, our
work on skill acquisition turned out better than I had any reason to believe.
The theory did change a bit, and these changes are reported in Anderson,
1987, but much of the basic analysis stayed untouched.
In 1986, the course of action seemed clear. I needed to write a book that
worked through the theory and elaborated on its foundations, but most of
all organized and simulated the mounds of data that we had accumulated
with our tutors on skill learning. I took a sabbatical, a 4-month jaunt in the
beginning of 1987 to Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. It was
supposed to be an opportunity to get away from my lab, which was forever
spewing out data, and put in the thinking time to get this process started.
Well, something happened to me on the way to Australia. Lynne Reder
and I took it as a goal on the trip to write a short paper drawing out the
implications of the human memory literature for the computer science field
of information retrieval. It seemed that a necessary prerequisite was to read
a little about the field of information retrieval. As I did so, an issue about
memory started to eat at me again. For a long time, I had felt that there was
something missing in the existing theories of human memory, including my
own. Basically, all of these theories characterized memory as an arbitrary
and nonoptimal configuration of memory mechanisms. I had long felt that
the basic memory processes were quite adaptive and perhaps even optimal;
however, I had never been able to see a framework in which to make this
point. In the computer science work on information retrieval, I saw that
framework laid out before me. Human memory was functioning as an
optimal information retrieval system.
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