Human Memory Adapts to Patterns of Information Use and

Why (maybe) LarKC Should Too

Lael Schooler

Simple Heuristics

• Shaped by human abilities– Vision, Hearing, Attention, Memory, ...

• Cognitive Processes– Frugal: use little information– Fast: do little integration

• Ecologically Rational– Bet on environmental structure

• Adaptive Toolbox– Selection of Strategies (reinforcment Learning)– Joerg Rieskamp

• A set of questions to ask

Take Home Message• Patterns of information use looks similar across domains

– Language• Speech to children• New York Times Headlines

– Social Contact• Email• Face to face

• We are likely to find similar patterns of information use in our case studies – Driving Behavior– Document access

• ACT-R’s Memory model (Activation Equations) learn to reflect these patterns of information use

• One flavor of Activation in LarKC’s retrieval experiments in WP 2 will take this approach– Can they scale?– Simpler better?

ACT-R• Adaptive Control of Thought Rational• An Integrated Theory of Cognition• Anderson and colleagues (1973-present)

– A couple hundred papers• My home town (CMU) • A framework to develop heuristics

• A source of core capacities• Easily implement take-the-best, etc

• Ecologically Rational

Subsymboliclocal

connectionistSelection

& Retrieval

Production Memory

Procedural Memory Modeled with Productions

Declarative Memory

RenoActivation: 0.5

ChicagoActivation: 2

New YorkActivation: 3

1 + 1 = 2Activation: 2.6

Rational analysis of memory

• Retrieve relevant information• For each item in memory, make a Bayesian estimate of

the probability that it will be useful in the present context.• Automatic• Basically Google + sensitivity to time

Anderson (1990)Anderson & Schooler (1991, 2000)

Schooler & Anderson (1997)

Rational Analysis of Memory and Functional Forgetting

Effects of Retention Interval on Memory Performance

Environmental Analysis

• Study informational demands of the environment– Match between memory and environment

• Do diverse domains share statistical structure?– language

• Speech to children• New York Times headlines

– social contacts• Distribution of email authors

Anderson & Schooler (1991, 2000)Schooler & Anderson (1997)

Sj senate

p(senate) = .015 p(senate/j) p(senate/j)

p(senate) measure .48 19.4 j veto .46 18.6 bill .38 15.3 votes .35 14.3

Combined Effects of Recency & Context

Speech New York Times

Combined Effects of Frequency & Recency

Human Social Contact

• Thorsten Pachur– University of Basel

• 10 participants• 100 Day Diary Study • Social contact was defined

– as all face-to-face or phone conversations lasting at least five minutes

– all electronic and other written communication of at least 100 words in length.

Recency Effects in Social Contacts

Driving Behavior Real Time City Case Study

• To what extent do our movments through the world share statistical structure with language and social contact?

Method

Data

• about 200 Subjects (1 car & 1 driver)

• one gps read every six minutes

• 2177817 total reads

• 1 x 1 Kilometer grid

Austin

Recency Effects in Driving

0

0.06

0.12

0.18

0.24

0.3

0 7 14 21 28

P(visit)

days since last visit

SE= +- .001

Recency Effects in Document Access

Recker & Pitkow, "Predicting Document Access in Large Multimedia Repositories." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3, no. 4 (1996): 352-375.

ACT-R Activation Equations

How a record’s activation grows and fades

n

k

dki tB

1

ln

How a record’s activation grows and fades

n

k

dki tB

1

ln

Sj senate

p(senate) = .015 p(senate/j) p(senate/j)

p(senate) measure .48 19.4 j veto .46 18.6 bill .38 15.3 votes .35 14.3

Ai Bi W jS jijC

Association to Context

Retrieval & Selection

• Estimate the probability (log-odds) that a RDF-Triple is needed in Reasoning/Deciding phase as a function of frequency, recency, spacing, and association to elements of the querry and method used

• Parameterize and Test whether ACT-R’s activation equations adequately model these probabilities

• Incorporate ACT-R’s base activation into other measures of association (e.g., semantic space model, Quantum Semantics, etc)

Ai Bi W jS jijC

Document Access

Recker & Pitkow, "Predicting Document Access in Large Multimedia Repositories."ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3, no. 4 (1996): 352-375.

Combined Effects of Recency & Context

Take Home Message• Patterns of information use looks similar across domains

– Language• Speech to children• New York Times Headlines

– Social Contact• Email• Face to face

• We are likely to find similar patterns of information use in our case studies – Driving Behavior– Document access

• ACT-R’s Memory model (Activation Equations) learn to reflect these patterns of information use

• One flavor of Activation in LarKC’s retrieval experiments in WP 2 will take this approach– Can they scale?– Simpler better?

end