ACT-R meets fMRI

ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought - Rational) is a theory and computational model of human cognitive architecture. It consists of a set of modules with their own buffers, each devoted to processing a different kind of information. A production rule in the core production system can be fired based on the chunks in these buffers and then it changes the chunks in the buffer of the related modules or the state of the related modules, which may leads to fire a new production rule and so on to generate the cognitive behavior. It has successfully predicted and explained a broad range of cognitive psychological phenomena and found applications in the human-computer interface and other areas (see http://act-r.psy.emu.edu) and may have potential applications in Web intelligence. In recent years, a series of fMRI experiments have been performed to explore the neural basis of cognitive architecture and to build a two-way bridge between the information processing model and fMRI. The patterns of the activations of brain areas corresponding to the buffers of the major modules in ACT-R were highly consistent across these experiments; and ACT-R has successfully predicted the Blood Oxygenation Level-Depend (BOLD) effect in these regions. The approach of ACT-R meets fMRI may shed light on the research of Web Intelligence (WI) meets Brain Informatics (BI).