The effects of repeating a task-irrelevant element and inserting intervening trials between the last prime and the probe trial in a negative priming study were compared with a standard prime/probe pair. An associative model based on SAC (e.g. Reder & Schunn, 1996; Schunn, Reder, Nhouyvanisvong, Richards, & Stroffolino, 1997) was able to account for both the decrease in response times across the repeated primes and the increase in response times when the task-irrelevant element became relevant.

Individual differences in working memory are an important source of information for refining theories of memory and cognition. Computational modeling is an effective tool for studying individual differences because it allows researchers to maintain the basic structure of a theory while perturbing a particular component. This paper presents a computational model for a digit working memory task and demonstrates that varying a single parameter captures individual differences in that task. The model is developed within the framework of the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 1993), and the continuous parameter manipulated represents attentional capacity for the current goal.

Adaptivity is examined within a complex task environment: the Kanfer-Ackerman Air Traffic Controller Task. A computational model is developed in ACT-R to account for such adaptivity using an implicit learning mechanism.