A model of procedure acquisition from written instructions.

Abstract

People must frequently make use of instructions to carry out procedures such as recipes or operating procedures in their daily lives. However, there has been little theoretical work on how instructions are used to acquire procedures. Bovair and Kieras (1990) outlined a model of procedure acquisition from text. This model had three main stages: a basic comprehension stage where the text is processed, a procedure comprehension stage where a procedure is constructed based on the information in the text, and a procedure execution stage where the procedure is executed and the specified actions are carried out. Within the procedure comprehension stage are three main processes: the constructor process, an immediate transfer process, and an acquisition monitor. This dissertation describes an attempt to build this model of procedure acquisition as a cognitive simulation (the PA model). The acquisition monitor was not built, and the immediate transfer process exists only in a crude form, but the major processes of the model were implemented in the PA model as production rules. The PA model was given as input the actual instructions used by subjects to perform several different procedures on a control panel. The model was successful in taking these instructions and converting them into a form that it could use to actually carry out the actions specified in the instructions. Statistics derived from the model were used to predict subject behavior in an experiment first described in Kieras and Bovair (1986). The fit of the model to the data was excellent, suggesting that the PA model will prove to be a useful analytic tool for studying procedure acquisition.