Architectural Building Blocks as the Locus of Adaptive Behavior Selection

Historically CPM-GOMS has been used to predict total time for long stretches of behavior. In “Milliseconds Matter”, Gray and Boehm-Davis (2000) use CPM-GOMS to develop microstrategy variants with subtly different internal structure to explain differences observed in empirical data collected. They argue for microstrategies as the basic unit of adaptive behavior selection. While the microstrategies developed provide a good fit to the data, there is neither direct evidence for microstrategies as compared to other possible constructs nor an explicit statement of the theory underlying their construction. While the use of CPM-GOMS as an explanatory mechanism is a substantial advance, microstrategies have theoretical and practical limitations in terms of: microstrategies functioning as cognitive units, composition and structure, and dependency constraints. An alternative construct called an Architectural Process Cascade (APC) is proposed as the locus of adaptive behavior selection. An APC-based model of the Gray and Boehm-Davis button study task is presented to address the limitations of microstrategies.