Modeling Effects of Age in Complex Tasks: A Case Study in Driving

While computational cognitive modeling has made great strides in addressing complex dynamic tasks, the modeling of individual differences in complex tasks remains a largely unexplored area of research. In this paper we present a straightforward approach to modeling individual differences, specifically age-related cognitive differences, in complex tasks, and illustrate the application of this approach in the domain of driving. We borrow ideas from rigorous work in the EPIC cognitive architecture (Meyer et al., 2001) and extend them to the ACT-R architecture (Anderson et al., in press) and a recently-developed ACT-R driver model (Salvucci, Boer, & Liu, 2001) to model the effects of age on driver behavior. We describe two validation studies that demonstrate how this approach accounts for two important age-related effects on driver performance, namely effects on lateral stability and brake response during both normal driving and driving while performing a secondary task.