As part of writing a recent report on ACT-R for the journal Human Computer Interaction, we were motivated to think about how ACT-R's visual interface would deal with the task of menu selection. There we presented a fit of ACT-R to some menu selection data reported by Nilsen (1991) that had been addressed in the same issue by the EPIC model of Kieras and Meyer. This is the first case of a model where the visual interface is serving a significant role in a real ACT-R application. The previous results we reviewed served just to illustrate how the visual interface realized standard models of visual information processing and to extract 185 msec. as an estimate of the time to switch attention. The menu search task is not necessarily more complex than these earlier experiments but does reflect a domain of application for which ACT-R was intended. Many experiments we have modeled in ACT-R do involve menu selection as a subtask.

ACT-R Model