Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Modeling cognitive processes is one of the major tasks of cognitive science. This work presents a computer modelof a study described in ”Flexible Strategy Use in Young Children’s Tic-Tac-Toe” (Crowley & Siegler, 1993) in whichauthors made an attempt to characterize decision-making in a conflict-of-interests-like environment. In the experiments,kindergarten/primary school children and an algorithm-based opponent played a series of games in Tic-Tac-Toe. Theoutcomes seemed to indicate existence of a hierarchy of rules that is constructed with experience. Although already testedalgorithmically, the simulation detailed in the paper was applicable to a narrow class of problems only. The model shownin this work was built using a cognitive architecture, i.e. computer-based structure mimicking general functioning of thehuman mind. We used a rule-based system ACT-R that operates in mental rules paradigm and successfully replicatedresults of the mentioned study.