Interaction Patterns as Support for Cognitive Modeling

Cognitive models represent the knowledge and information processes that are assumed to be required for task performance. Cognitive architectures are used as an integrative framework of psychological theories; they further allow the simulation of human behavior in finegrained steps. The promising potential of cognitive modeling as a method for evaluating dynamic humanmachine systems, especially in early stages of the design process, is well-known. Nevertheless, the use of this method in industrial and research departments is sporadic as a result of both high costs and a huge amount of time to build and verify models. Following from this, the development of high-level languages to model human cognition based on low-level cognitive architecture is a contemporary matter in the cognitive research community (see Ritter et al., 2006, for an overview of current high-level approaches). Simplifying the model-building process and improving concepts for sharing and reusing model components are the main objectives of the various high-level approaches.