Modeling Intuitive Decision Making in ACT-R

Abstract

One mode of human decision-making is considered intuitive, i.e., unconscious situational pattern recognition. Implicit statistical learning, which involves the sampling of invariances from the environment and is known to involve procedural (i.e., non-declarative) memory, has been shown to be a foundation of this mode of decision making. We present an ACT-R model of implicit learning whose implementation entailed a declarative memory-based learner of the classification of example strings of an artificial grammar. The model performed very well when compared to humans. The fact that the simulation of implicit learning could not be implemented in a straightforward way via a non-declarative memory approach, but rather required a declarative memorybased implementation, suggests that the conceptualization of procedural memory in the ACT-R framework may need to be expanded to include abstract representations of statistical regularities. Our approach to the development and testing of models in ACT-R can be used to predict the development of intuitive decision-making in humans.