Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people read spatial descriptions they construct a mental model. When they attempt to remember the spatial description they may rely on memory for the description itself, memory for the constructed model, and/or memory for the operations used to construct the mental model an episodic construction trace (Payne, 1993). This paper reports an ACT-R simulation of this multiple-representation account of memory for spatial descriptions. The simulation shows that the idea of a remembered construction trace can arise naturally from ACT-R's treatment of goals as declarative memory elements. The simulation captures the most important experimental data in favour of the construction trace hypothesis.