A Preliminary ACT-R Compiler in Herbal

We added an additional component, called Declarative Memory, in the Herbal environment. With this component, users can represent hierarchical or sequential tasks in an ACT-R model easily. The Declarative Memory consists of 6 components: library, element name, parent name, first child name, next sibling name, and action name. Through these components, users can layout their whole task hierarchically or sequentially, and the relations among tasks are shown in a tree form in the bottom of the user interface. Based on these relationships, the productions are made by ACT-R compiler. To explore the flexibility of this high-level compiler approach, we added a user expertise compiler flag to Herbal. It leads to compiling either a novice or an expert user model. The expert model does not retrieve declarative memory items when it executes subtasks. However, the novice model retrieves declarative memory items to move to the next task step according to the goal hierarchy in declarative memory. Figure 1 shows the difference between Expert and Novice model.